Slashdot Mirror
LibreOffice Now Available On Apple's Mac App Store
sfcrazy writes: It's an event of historical magnitude: One of the most popular Open Source projects, LibreOffice, is now available directly from Apple's Mac App Store. You can get LibreOffice on OSX with automatic updates, long-term maintenance, and optional professional support, for the first time. There are two editions of LibreOffice available on the Mac App Store: LibreOffice from Collabora and LibreOffice Vanilla. While the Vanilla edition can be downloaded free of cost, LO from Collabora has a price tag of $10.
"Free through the App store" is an implicit endorsement that plain old "free" can't beat, even taking open-source licensing out of the picture.
Seems like Collabra basically ship more or less vanilla open office but you get professional support for your money and they might be more responsive to bugs you file or something. Not 100% sure.
As for free through the App Store, well, I've had that thruogh my "apt" store (ho ho ho) for as long as LO has existed. Yet another leading innovation from the world of Linux :)
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Typical Windoze idiot comment there AC.
Reality Check: You can install all the software you want on a Mac without having to go through the Apple Apps store. But since you've been drinking Windoze Koolaid for so long you probably are not aware of that. The vast majority of the software we use on our Macs did not come via the App store. The App store is just one of many ways to get software on the Mac. Chill out.
If there will be in app purchases.
Thanks for the memories -- it's been a long long time since I've seen that troll.
Here's the earliest version I could find with a zero effort search: http://kottke.org/98/11/my-mac... Maybe there is an earlier one?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Perhaps you meant...EXTRAORDINARY magnitude.
No, TFS says "historical magnitude" just to refer to the fact that LibreOffice largely looks like Microsoft Office did over a decade ago.
(P.S. I say this as a fan of LibreOffice....)
I just performed two copy tests on my 2013 MacBook Pro, 2.7 Ghz i7, 16GB RAM. I copied the exact same file (3.78 GB) from one location to a different location on the same disk drive. The test was performed under two operating systems on that machine:
- The latest beta release of Yosemite (10.10.4): 32.69 s
- The latest insider preview of Windows 10 (build 10130): 19.56 s
This isn't a full benchmark suite by any means, but if I can copy a 4GB file orders of magnitude faster than you can copy a 17 MB file on your MacBook Air or on your Windows PC, then you have some very screwed up stuff going on.
I don't want to start a holy war here
Yeah, that is precisely what you were attempting to do.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Very few people using a Mac probably even care now.
So then it looks like Microsoft Office did, back when Microsoft Office was good.
I wouldn't exactly call Office 2003 "good." I'm not going to get into the "ribbon wars" -- personally, I could never stand it, but I understand some others love the ribbon and find it useful.
But I'm just talking about the fact that MS Office was a bloated piece of crap a decade ago too. I can't remember when it wasn't significantly bloated after the applications migrated from DOS. Go back and look at the versions of many applications prior to Windows 95 -- much, much smaller, but basically most of the features you still see today. Somehow we now have MS Office applications that take up 100 times more space, but they don't really have many more useful features than they did 20+ years ago (when you could install them with a handful of floppy disks).
You mean before they added that ribbon bullshit?
Sign me up!
(I already use LibreOffice too :) )
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
That's fine and all. But it doesn't matter since LibreOffice is distributed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, not GPL. http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...
I don't know offhand if there's a conflict between the App Store and MPL.
End of Line.
The free LibreOffice Vanilla version on the App Store is "Prerelease" version 4.4.4.2 while the Collabora supported LibreOffice is the "Still" version 4.3.7.
Collabora is not doing LibreOffice any favors by putting a version that is not ready for the mainstream out for public consumption. More likely, they're using the Vanilla as a means to drive people to their $10 version.
Seems a bit underhanded.
The free LibreOffice Vanilla is the "Prerelease" version 4.4.4.2 while the $10 LibreOffice-from-Collabora is "Still" version 4.3.7.
Collabora isn't doing LibreOffice any favors by putting a prerelease version that is not ready for prime time out for public consumption. More likely, they are introducing the public to a buggy experience, and then offering to fix the experience using a non-prerelease version that costs $10.
Seems a bit underhanded.
Even the free one would require that you be on the Mac App store to get it, which requires you to be tracked by having an Apple ID. Far better to bypass the store entirely and get libre office directly.
Which you have always been able to do on OS X and still are able to do.
What this does is open up LibreOffice to a whole new demographic who wouldn't have done that before.
I'm not seeing a downside here, other than "apple bad, lolz". More exposure for large open source projects is a good thing, surely.