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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.
So what is the story between the two? I know that LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and that some/most/all of the devs moved to LibreOffice.
Is LibreOffice now far enough ahead to say forget about OpenOffice?
wot no sig
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
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
I understand why you're hesitant to try it out and see for yourself, being such a costly program and all.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
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".
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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Companies won't use any software that they can't make closed source derivatives of. That why no company uses MS Office.
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.
That's because MS Word and L/OO Writer are not word processors anymore. They're WYSIWYG document creation tools, i.e. they attempt to combine text input, text management, and document layout into one tool.
Besides which, word processors aren't feature complete yet. Even advanced text-only word processors like Textpad and Notepad++ are constantly adding new features, and has a leg up on Word/Writer on things like search and cursor movement.
And with persistent connectivity, there's a whole new layer of features for everyone to add.
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