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LibreOffice 5.0 Released
New submitter ssam writes: The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project, bringing new features including Windows 10, Android and Ubuntu touch compatibility, superior interoperability features, an updated UI, and lots of under the hood improvements. For people still running OpenOffice it is probably time to move over.
LibreOffice now supports amd64, which is a huge boon for people that work with very large documents. It purports to have better .docx compatibility, although I myself have found that MSWord is more likely to screw up the formatting in .docx documents than LibreOffice is.
All-in-all, a good day for free software, and a bad day for Microsoft.
Having no release manager and no one contributing code for 9 months seems like more of a "Dead but hasn't stopped twitching" sort of state.
That's quite a long time, and by the way, open office was not massive pile of shit. It worked great for me 7 years ago. I've been using libre office instead of open office ever since libre office was released.
As for starting up, libre office writer seems to start about as fast as word 2010, which is a massive pile of shit. And you can use that quick start thing, that loads on windows start.
Oracle bought out Sun. When they looked at their IP portfolio, they appeared to have lost their minds, and assert their ownership over several open-source projects. Yes, I believe it was some 26 programmers who left Open-Office and started LibreOffice. Then Oracle was falling out of brainshare, and didn't seem want to appear as an orgre, but it was already out of its cave by then.
What happened: Oracle's possessiveness made LibrieOffice into the superior office suite it is today!
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
You've got it the wrong way around license-wise. LibreOffice can pull anything they'd like from OpenOffice, but OpenOffice won't because they don't want LGPL/GPL code polluting their code-tree. OpenOffice spent a long time rewriting GPL/LGPL code to ensure they could keep their license pure which is one of the reasons they're so much further behind LibreOffice.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Grab LibreOffice and check it out. If startup time is a key point for you, install and enable the QuickStart feature. It'll pre-load part of LibreOffice as Windows starts up and then let it sit idle in the background, just like Microsoft Office does to improve startup time.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Last time I tried using Open Office 6 or 7 years ago it was a massive pile of shit.
I standardized our company on OpenOffice (and later LibreOffice) about 5 years ago. It's worked great. There may be specific features in Microsoft Office that make it a non-starter for some people but I think most people will hardly notice the difference. If your company already is tied to Microsoft then switching might be painful but if you are starting from scratch I would go with LibreOffice in most cases over Microsoft Office.
Is LibreOffice a significant improvement?
OpenOffice in my experience has been progressing more slowly than LibreOffice for the last few years. I switched our company to LibreOffice as a result.
Does the word processor start up as fast as M$ Word?
Kind of a meaningless question. Both can be loaded on system startup and thus will "start up" in just a few seconds as a result. If that is your biggest concern however I think you really didn't take a very hard look at OpenOffice "6 or 7 years ago".
You've got it the wrong way around license-wise. LibreOffice can pull anything they'd like from OpenOffice, but OpenOffice won't because they don't want LGPL/GPL code polluting their code-tree. OpenOffice spent a long time rewriting GPL/LGPL code to ensure they could keep their license pure which is one of the reasons they're so much further behind LibreOffice.
That's what I said. The "they" in the GP consistently referred to LibreOffice.
LibreOffice uses the GPL/LGPL code because they had no choice - it was the only option available to them since they were forking the source code.
OpenOffice is purely and solely licensed under Apache License version 2. They also didn't have to rewrite code for GPL/LGPL compliance - Oracle wholesale relicensed the work to Apache version 2 before they could contribute it to Apache to start with. A lot of their time was in integrating IBM's Symphony changes, and catching backup after several months of minimal to no development going on; but they've re-established that.
So LibreOffice can pull chances from OpenOffice since Apache License V2 code can be easily relicensed to GPL/LGPL, but OpenOffice cannot pull changes from LibreOffice.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Many of the developers were already fed up with Sun's poor stewardship of the OpenOffice.org project, hence the go-oo project which hosted many improvements that Sun did not integrate and was the basis of OpenOffice packages that most Linux distributions shipped. Oracle was just the final straw that catalysed a true fork (go-oo was more of a patch set that needed to follow OOo). LO used the GPL because that was pretty much the only option (and maybe the developers think it is better for LO than a permissive licence). LO made big strides, for example in code clean up and build systems even before Oracle decided dump the code on the Apache foundation. The permissive was probably to keep IBM happy, as they have previously released closed derivatives of OO.
What code exactly have LO stolen from AOO? There is nothing new in AOO to be worth taking, LO has always been a step ahead of AOO (and is about 3 steps ahead now). The only possible example is the sidebar, but that was developed by IBM, not Oracle or Apache.
Personally I think Apache should de-list AOO on the grounds that they can't even produce security updates in a timely manor.
Or people who hate wasting a sheet of paper at the end of every document because they just can't remove that final page break if it comes after a table. Either/or.
Your macro isn't GPL if you don't want it to. LibreOffice is LGPL to begin with, not GPL.
I wrote about this on reddit only recently ...
Link to the discussion there
Copied in full to here:
So back when Sun maintained OpenOffice.org and sold StarOffice they had a Contributor License Agreement that required handing over ownership of patches to them so they could sell the closed source supported suite and license out to IBM for Symphony.
To get around this bureaucracy and to not sign over ownership for patches most distributions used go-oo.org (aka ooo-build) that was the source code of OpenOffice.org with a bunch of patches on top to help compatibility with MS Office and some other things that Sun could or did not want in the upstream oo.org code.
When Oracle bought Sun they left oo.org languishing with no maintenance for months. This was naturally unacceptable to the various linux distros and they didn't want to be beholden to Oracle's whims (for good reason given the state of the various projects that used to be with Sun). Due to this they got together and formed The Document Foundation and took the go-oo.org code (which was basically what this group used and collaborated on anyway) and forked it to LibreOffice.
Fast forward some more time and Oracle decide they don't want anything to do with OpenOffice.org after all and essentially (with IBM's help ... presumably so there would be a sort of maintained base for Symphony) dumped it on the Apache Software Foundation. As per their requirements it went through an incubation process and all the code was relicensed to the Apache Public License. This was months after LibreOffice had been created and worked on and most consider it a pretty petty move rather than giving the brand to TDF to work with.
From that point on it's pretty much been IBM driving Apache OpenOffice (as they renamed oo.org to) although they appear to have stopped caring about it mid to end last year. The amount of development work on AOO is minimal compared to LO and the number of active committers is in the teens (at best) for AOO compared to the hundreds for LO.
Due to the way the licensing works out LO can merge in any fixes (there were some in the early days, not many now as can be seen in the CVE issue I mentioned) but AOO cannot merge in work from LO.
The last release of AOO was August 2014 and if you go look at the changelogs from 3.4 (the first AOO release as opposed to oo.org IIRC... mostly rebranding) up to the 4.1.1 then you'll see there's been minimal work - mostly translations. Anything developed/fixed in AOO is either merged into LO or improved/obsoleted by other work. Compare these to the release notes for each LO release from the forking point of 3.3 and it really is quite significant - the heavy work on clean up and better build systems for LO lower the barrier to entry for LO contribution by the common person too.
The proposed AOO release of 4.1.2 is going forwards at the moment - driven mostly by only a few people Apache OpenOffice Dev mail archives.
To give an idea how bad this has got the no-interaction code execution as privileges of user bug by a special HWP file was announced publicly last April. It was fixed in LibreOffice the same month and users would have had the update notification and been protected. Anyone using Apache OpenOffice is still vulnerable and although there was a disclosure on the security part of the AOO site at the time, the workaround was to 'delete .dll/.so' ... not a release with a fix and unless anyone actively went to check up on this they would not have known the issue.
To add to this (if it's not enough already) AOO can still only read and not write docx/xlsx/pptx (OOXML) files produced by MS Office whereas LibreOffice can