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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.
Have you considered that it would've taken lots longer for oracle to give up the code, if the devs had stayed? And it might've not happened at all. Of course you haven't. Not to mention that at the point where oracle gave the code, there was lots and lots of done for libre office. Sure it'd be nice to be able to combine the effort, but licensing does not allow that. I don't have anything against open office, but i'm not going to change from libre office until open office is not only to the par with libre office, a lots better than libre office.
But seriously, your description of libre office people running at first sign of trouble is complete bullshit. You are a douche, there's no way around that fact.
Why would the GPL license be a problem for corporate environments?
Unless you change the code and distribute the changed version outside your organisation, the license really doesn't matter much.
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Oh, you silly kids! What the OSS fanatics fail to understand is that once a person leaves graduate school to get a "real job" in the "real world" that time suddenly becomes much more important to money for many, many people. Saving a few hundred bucks on software is pointless (to me) if I have to spend more than an hour dicking with it, for example.
I understand exactly what you're talking about, and I agree that cost-benefit analyses have to be made.
But there is also a problem in corporate culture where cost-benefit analyses are focused too much on the immediate future. Paying $100/year to license software may seem worth it if you're just using that software for a year and retraining may require a few hours.
But what about after 3 years? Or 5 years? Or 10 years? And what about other fringe benefits of OSS, like your ability to customize the code yourself if you want a new feature? If you're a big business and you want to complain that you lack feature X in LibreOffice, you could either pay Microsoft thousands of dollars annually (perhaps tens of thousands, in a big company), or you could use that money to pay a developer to add feature X to LibreOffice and customize it to do exactly what you want (rather than what Microsoft gives you).
And then there's end-of-life concerns, too. Do you want to pay to retrain all your employees when Microsoft decides whatever its next random mutation of UI happens? Or do you pay Microsoft extra to continue security patches after your version is no longer supported? Or do you just use that money to pay people who can patch your free OSS suite, which can be maintained by anyone since the source is available?
These are all cost-benefit analyses. But often they aren't actually decided on that basis by large corporations -- they are decided because "Microsoft Office is the standard" and people in power to make decisions don't want to have to deal with the switch or don't believe "free" could possibly be as good, or they don't consider alternatives to get the features they want in OSS that might be cheaper than paying licensing fees for many years.
...once a person leaves graduate school to get a "real job" in the "real world"...time suddenly becomes much more important to money for many, many people. Saving a few hundred bucks on software is pointless (to me) if I have to spend more than an hour dicking with it, for example. For other people, a few hundred bucks (actually Office 365 is only $100/year) might be worth two hours of their time to dick with. Anything more than that, and it's not worth my time
Well, whatever works best for you, works best for you, of course. But my mileage has varied.
Whenever I've started a job someplace that uses a lot of proprietary, licensed software, it always takes quite a while for me to get a license. I invariably have to explicitly ask my manager or the IT department to get me a license, even though there's no possible way I would have been able do my job without it. I can only ask for the license after I find out I need a particular product, of course, and in extreme cases it may take a few days just to find that out, because for some reason people try to conceal the very need for a license like it's Voldemort's name or something. Whoever I ask first is never authorized to just buy these things and hand them out, and so they have to run the request past three more layers of management and the accounting department. Half the time the answer comes back "no", in which case you, the new guy, have to go before some tribunal of trolls to argue your case. Or they might tell you to "share" the license with some other guy, maybe by (illegally) sharing a login, maybe by passing a physical device back and forth. Multiply all this wasted time by the number of licensed products in use, and the amount of time sucked starts to get significant.
Compare this to: "Oh, we use Apache Gimmudgy. Just download it from their site."
Then there's the whole multiplatform issue. Maybe a third of the team uses Linux, a third uses Windows, and a third use Macs. Proprietary packages aren't really great about working across platforms. Neither is FOSS, of course, but it is usually a little better about it--or at least they're more likely to use an open format for their save files.