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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.
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
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.