The LibreOffice Story

An anonymous reader writes: Jono Bacon in his latest column writes about the story of LibreOffice and how it rose out of the ashes of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. Bacon also touches on why he feels LibreOffice is such a key piece of Open Source for communities across the world. Jono says: "To look at LibreOffice today and compare it to Microsoft Office can be tempting. Sure, LibreOffice does not provide the same level of features and finesse Microsoft's suite may boast, but when I think of the before and after vanity shots of the suite back in 1999 and today, what the community has accomplished is phenomenal. Developing LibreOffice has been hard, technically challenging, and at times demotivating work, and contributors' efforts can be seen by millions of users across the world."

Comments

SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[lesincompetent]

The FOSS movement should go all-in with LibreOffice in an effort to provide a perfect alternative to MS office.
Reliance on MS office is the only thing that holds back many of my folks (familiy, friends) from a total FOSS conversion of their computing habits.
Yes i said "perfect". It is feasible and there are no excuses.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[MacTO]

It is a pretty safe bet that your family and friends are just using Microsoft Office as an excuse to avoid talking about Linux.

Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered. When you step up to more advanced features, which LibreOffice mostly have covered, you're talking about stuff that is used by a dedicated group of people. Then you have the features that are largely designed for corporate environments, which would hardly be ever used by individuals even if they used those features in the workplace. Even if LibreOffice doesn't support one of those features, it wouldn't matter.

So what those people are probably saying amounts to: they are comfortable with what they have and don't want to learn something new (may that be Linux or LibreOffice).

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[nine-times]

It is a pretty safe bet that your family and friends are just using Microsoft Office as an excuse to avoid talking about Linux.

That wouldn't make a lot of sense, since my family and friends don't know what Linux is.

Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered.

It's true enough, but honestly, it needs to be prettier. I know it's superficial and stupid, and everyone here will say that LibreOffice shouldn't bother trying to look "pretty" or that it's already "pretty" enough, but here's the thing: I've always had terrible luck getting people to use LibreOffice. My impression is that there's no particular reason in terms of functionality, but it looks to them like it's a cheap knock-off of an old version of Microsoft Office. On both Windows and Mac, the icons seem a bit out of place, the UI takes up too much screen real-estate because things are kind of spread out, the default fonts and formatting are less attractive, the dialog boxes don't look native to the OS, and I don't even know what else people are reacting to. I think some people are confused by the way that it's sort of all one single application, but also a bunch of different applications, depending on how you launch it...?

Anyway, I can't get people to use it, even when it's exactly the tool they need. I've had an easier time getting people to use Apple's Pages/Sheets, and not for technical reasons, but because the app is prettier, the templates are prettier, and it feels easier to make a pretty document. At least, that's what I think the difference is.

But suggesting that aesthetics matter has always been blasphemy here at Slashdot.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're missing is the fact that most normal users still get files from other people, and these still don't always render correctly. For example, my kids' teachers will send out documents in Word or Powerpoint; often the clipart they love so dearly is oddly reformatted and covers text. And when the teacher assigns a PowerPoint presentation to be created, and ends up grading on the prettiness of the template, and Libre Office has only bare-bones templates, it's a bummer. Little stuff like that can be a surprisingly big hurdle; I now have a laptop with Office loaded just for these types of cases.
For document generation, Libre Office is awesome and does everything I need.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[nine-times]

Creating a "perfect" alternative to MS Office is harder than just engineering an office suite. LibreOffice is great in many ways, but one of the things that keeps many people on MS Office is that they've built their workflows on Outlook. Those workflows don't only depend on Outlook, but through Outlook they depend on Exchange. So if you really want to displace Microsoft, you have to create a mail/groupware client to Outlook, either by creating one compatible with Exchange or creating groupware server to replace Exchange as well. Or you need to create an alternative to both of those things that won't screw up businesses' workflows. Or I guess you can convince businesses to overhaul their workflows.

The issue of "workflow" is a huge issue that too many people ignore. Even if a different software solution provides all the same "functionality", if it requires people to change how they work, they aren't going to go for it. It's especially difficult if it changes the way people work by requiring frequent repetitive steps (e.g. if you can do all the same things, but if doing it in Microsoft Office requires 2 clicks and LibreOffice requires 5 clicks, then people are going to get frustrated).

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[FranTaylor]

And when the teacher assigns a PowerPoint presentation to be created

fuck me, the world really is coming to an end

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[ColdWetDog]

Maybe he means .... the Ribbon.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[qpqp]

Actually, last time I looked, there were completely free MAPI connectors to break out of that ecosystem, as well as Free exchange clients that cover most, if not all functionality of the Outlook/Exchange combo, including calendaring.
It's been a while, so I don't remember the links anymore and I didn't take notes unfortunately, but they were easy to find (I believe, I started drilling down from sogo.nu and the enterprise gateway all in one live-cds like Zentyal, through which I found openchange). This was a bit from the other perspective (i.e. replace Exchange, not necessarily Outlook, but even that area benefitted from a huge improvement in relation to ~10-12 years ago, when I last was looking for that).

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[armanox]

Powerpoint will restructure everything if you open it on a screen with a different aspect ratio....Or open it on a Mac instead of Windows.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[Flavianoep]

There are many tiers to MS Office. There is the Home and Student, the Small Business, the Standard...
Does anyone know how LibreOffice compares to them?
IMHO, LibreOffice has more features than MS Office Home and Student, but cannot substitute the higher tiered editions of MS Office.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[jfengel]

Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered.

There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office. For a large number of office workers, Office is a collaboration tool. A document saved by one user and emailed to another, then edited and returned, needs to be able to preserve all of the formatting. Users care a *lot* about formatting, and if it gets messed up, they lose confidence in the software.

Office's formatting algorithms are abominable, and it's no surprise that LibreOffice can't mimic them perfectly. And users really, really need to apply a lot less formatting and focus instead on content.

Still... for a lot of offices, that's going to be the one unbreakable rule. MS Office is the de facto standard, and anything else needs to comply with that, even if the standard is for something user's shouldn't really want and which is poorly implemented (perhaps specifically to make it impossible to switch).

I'd love to see more offices switch to something like Google Docs or other systems with minimal formatting, so that they can stop tinkering with fonts and actually focus on the words. Sadly, users do love it.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[techno-vampire]

There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office.

And it never will be. Ignoring the people who won't try LiberOffice because it can't duplicate MS Office's behavior in some obscure corner-case, there's the fact that compatibility with MS Office is a constantly-moving goal post. Every version does things differently and has its own, proprietary format so that no matter what happens, LibreOffice will always be trying to catch up with the latest and "greatest" version of MS Office. Of course, so will everybody using an older version of Office, but all the MicroSofties are going to pay attention to is how FOSS can't keep up with whatever MS is currently pushing.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[RoccamOccam]

It would be beyond nice if LibreOffice could eventually be ported to Qt.

I assume that a large part of the codebase is still responsible for the platform-independent UI that stated with StarOffice. Removing that responsibility from the LibreOffice team might eventually payoff in improving the look-and-feel and freeing resources for feature enhancements.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[BadDreamer]

There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office.

Not even MS Office has that, and that doesn't seem to matter. No, that is not where the problem lies. The compatibility only has to be good enough, and for pretty much everything it is.

Quite often it is even better than MS Office. I have used Libre Office to rescue documents which MS Office stopped loading because something broke in them. And that did not sway people enough to even make them try out Libre Office. Compatibility is a non-issue. It's all inertia.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[steelfood]

By imperfectly mimicking the old Office GUI, the LibreOffice GUI (and UI in general) ended up falling into the uncanny valley. It sort of looks like MS Office, but because it differs in subtle ways both visually and behaviorially, it's off-putting.

If there's any OSS product that needs a UI redesign, it'd be LibreOffice. It'd be great if Mozilla could ship all their Firefox UI resources over, since it seems Firefox has so many choices they can't seem to decide which one to go with.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[UnknownSoldier]

> But suggesting that aesthetics matter has always been blasphemy here at Slashdot.

Graphics (OpenGL/WebGL) and UI/UX guy here. That is NOT blasphemy, contrary to popular opinion. The balance of _form_ AND _function_ really is the sweet spot.

Sadly, most modern UI/UX guys are retarded. Whether they be at Apple, Microsoft, Facebook,Google, etc., they all think that form is the only thing that matters, functionality be damned. Want to tell the difference between a button and static text/image. Too bad! The will ram-rod a broken touch interface down everyone's throat whether they like it or not.

The weakness of open source is that no one takes UI seriously. You get powerful software with tons of options but you almost have to be a computer science major to even understand half of it.

The saddest part is that I agree with you 100%. And you'll probably be ignored, because most people don't understand or value the out-of-the-box experience. :-(

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The catch: he works in said company, in PR and marketing. So he can't tell you.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[Anonymous Coward]

No. The compatibility is *not* "good enough" for "pretty much everything". I can (and do) see breakages in just about every document I ever try to convert.

For instance, look at the indentation of bullet point items. This isn't hard, the rule is perfectly simple. Yet to this day, LibreOffice can't correctly convert from a document saved in MS Word.

Or headers and footers. The spacing is screwed up, and sometimes the fonts change for no reason. The same thing sometimes happens with styles. Unless you stick with the default fonts, it seems LibreOffice just doesn't care.

These are not obscure, edge-case, one-in-a-million features. I use them in pretty much every document I produce, and so do lots of other people I know.

False comparison

[argStyopa]

I know he's trying to be charitable, but there's no need.

"Sure, LibreOffice does not provide the same level of features and finesse Microsoft's suite may boast..."
Who cares? My guess is that most users don't use at least 90% of the "features" in MS Office; if we're talking only about features that Office has an LO doesn't, I'd lift that to 99%.

LibreOffice is terrific, and I wish I could convince my company to switch.

Re:False comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

One problem is that those, such as myself, who do use at least a few of the 90% of the "little used" features in MS Office then send thier documents to many others who have no idea that these "unneeded" features are being used. The fact a user doesn't know they are using a feature doesn't mean they are not using that feature.

In a home or very small office environment this is, of course, less likely. However, many of these people seem to find both LibreOffice and MS Office mindnumbingly complicated.

One area that badlly cripples LibreOffice adoption is, ironically, its horrible documentation (i.e. "help"). I regularly use an ancient version of office (no need to give MS more money than needed) that I acquired about 15 years ago and it's "help" documentation is head and shoulders above that of the latest version of LibreOffice. This is true for both "power users" and "casual users" needs.

Re:False comparison

[0123456]

That's presumably why Microsoft added the evil Ribbon, so Word users would have no idea how to find the features they use in a processor with a saner interface.

Then again, those users probably have no idea how to find the features they use in the Ribbon, either.

Uh, what?

[Zontar The Mindless]

To be fair, I was unaware of much of the internal considerations going on at Sun, so their reluctance to engage may have also been a result of other forces, such as external management groups or constrained engineering resources.

I can't help but wonder how this guy managed to miss the thousands of layoffs from Sun that were happening at that time--one week, it was 6,000, the next it was 8,000. The company was losing money hand over fist, and projects were being shut down right and left. This was all in the press, too. So you'd think this guy could have figured out that we had slightly greater concerns right then than a freebie that was costing us rather than making us money to develop.

(Yes, I got to watch Sun implode, from the inside. Not pretty.)

My parents and software.

[jitterman]

My Pops just three evenings ago asked me which version of office to get with the new machine he is going to build. I responded "LibreOffice" and showed him why. He and Mom are trying it out now (she's a teacher, so her choice will decide), and so far seems they are happy with it.

Re:My parents and software.

[JonnyCalcutta]

In that case just go with Google and Libreoffice. Google Docs is more than good enough for the basics, writing, etc (and you don't have to bother saving and syncing); LibreOffice for anything more advanced and local sync via google drive. And the decider is, its free.

What I don't understand...

[camperdave]

What I don't understand is why Libre Office never put together a clone of OneNote. It's the one piece of software that's anchoring me to Windows.

Re:What I don't understand...

[snadrus]

Because it's a copycat of many other things already out there:
- Evernote: Notes everywhere
- Tomboy Notes: Save-on-Keypress desktop sticky notes. Public & Private host backup possible (I use this now, for reminders)
- GNote: Linux-only lightweight Tomboy Notes
- Google Keep: My preferred Android + Browser (Linux) note taker (I use this now to note what I should research later)
- Calendars of all kinds: Want to remember to do something at some time? Just put it at some free time in your calendar!

The wet blanket says ..

[udippel]

No, I am not that convinced. Alas. Look at some basic bug reports, and how bugs reports are treated, and you'll find some abhorrent situations. Where it could shine, it didn't. Like surpassing MS Office.

First item: the silly image formats supported by MS Offce (only), to create a market for real formats, like SVG, EPS. LibreOffice simply dropped support, had a good number of bug reports some two years ago, and still pending.

It did much better than OpenOffice in colourful gadgets and widgets to please the eye of the casual user, yes, but did not focus on real technical improvements.

Equation editor. It is just okay, but not beyond. Still the same as OpenOffice. Does it import MS formulas? Does it offer a real WYSIWYG, or does one have to continuously click forth and back? The latter.

Did I write a number of bug reports to help out? Yes, I did. What I got was UNCO, or outright rejection, like 'try the most recent version, we think it has been solved'. How to try the most recent version if it isn't in the pools of my distro? And worse: When I tried, it hadn't.

All this makes me sad, because contrary to some other posters, I feel very confidently that LibreOffice is more consistent, better to handle, and overall the better alternative already today! And I can speak from some experience, since I was responsible for the layout of two books that you can buy on Amazon, and it did a great job. Also better than MS Office which tends to break any page layout with automatic page breaks of a floating text wherever it likes, depending on the version (2003, 2007), the underlying Windows version, and the mood of the day. Yes, with the same dictionary and same hyphenation. The author was at the end of her wits when MS Office had some 30+ pages with this, while in *Office all 511 pages were identical for author, and the two proof readers.

Re:The wet blanket says ..

[Tough Love]

Did I write a number of bug reports to help out? Yes, I did. What I got was UNCO, or outright rejection, like 'try the most recent version, we think it has been solved'. How to try the most recent version if it isn't in the pools of my distro? And worse: When I tried, it hadn't.

Don't be discouraged, you efforts are indeed appreciated, even if the response may seem lacking or perfunctory. You may have just run up against an overworked volunteer having a bad hair day. Just tag onto your bug report with the new info. That update is precious, and allows the devs to be more sure that their own efforts won't be wasted. Or in the best scenario, a dev with the same bug may find your current report by web search and decide to get the code and track it down themselves, and the team gets bigger by one person.

Re:LibreOffice didn't rise from the ashes

[FranTaylor]

The point is that developing two separate FOSS office suites means duplication of efforts that could otherwise be spent furthering development on a single FOSS office suite.

Why do we even bother making more than one kind of automobile? we should save engineering effort and all drive exactly the same car, imagine how much better the world would be. Do you see the problem with this mentality?

" means duplication of efforts" no it doesn't mean duplication of effort, because these are open projects and the developers can freely look at the changes in the other versions and port them or not as they see fit.

Re:LibreOffice didn't rise from the ashes

[FranTaylor]

I fail to see why fragmentation is a good thing.

really? usually fragmentation is the result of two parties with irreconcilable differences. would you prefer that they spend time fighting with each other or would you rather let them duke it out in implementation land and see who can make a better mousetrap?

let's look at some fragmentation over the years and see how it worked out:

- Steve Jobs took his developers away with him when he could not reconcile his design decisions with apple. He made his own version of the mac os, called it "next step". eventually apple saw the error in their ways, brought back jobs, and now OSX is next step.

- remember egcs versus gcc? gcc was getting old and stale and stagnant, new developers wanted new features on an expedited timeline and gcc said no. so egcs was forked, new features were implmented and tested and folded back into gcc. all around a good time

- remember node.js versus io.js? again the same deal as egcs versus gcc.

you can argue duplicated effort but in fact these forks allow new ideas to happen where they otherwise would not. can you argue with this?

Re:LibreOffice didn't rise from the ashes

[Kobun]

I disagree about your reframing of #4 - Oracle sat in silence far after Libreoffice was created, and it was longer still until Apache had the new project up and running. Let's come back to that in a little bit, however.

Let's discuss licensing.

• OpenOffice.org was dual-licensed, with the world at large caring about the LGPL v3. The final release with this code was on 25 January 2011.
• LibreOffice is licensed under the LGPL v3. Its initial release was also on 25 January 2011.
• Apache OpenOffice is under the Apache License v2. Initial release was 8 May 2012.

LibreOffice is under exactly the same license as OpenOffice.Org was - it defies logic to maintain that LibreOffice broke away from OpenOffice.org because of the license, and then kept that exact same license.

Consensus is that, after Oracle's purchase of Sun in 2010, OpenOffice.org was likely to be axed. Oracle showed little to no interest in it, and said even less. LibreOffice had nearly a half-year of uncontested mind-share before Oracle finally axed their paid developers and dumped the remains of OpenOffice on the Apache foundation for resurrection (re-licensing it in the process) in what was widely seen an attempt to save face. And it still took almost another year after that for the first release, due to the Apache re-licensing (which came well after the decision to create TDF).

Wikipedia is extensively sourced here. Perhaps it would be better to point out the specific pieces you feel are wrong?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The next chapter

[Tough Love]

The next chapter of the LibreOffice story must be "Full port to Android". It is pathetic that this has not already happened. No fault of the LibreOffice devs, it is the fault of the corporations who never managed to get their sorry asses out of bed to put money behind an effort that benefits themselves more than anybody.

No, not Google. Google hates LibreOffice because it competes with their cloud lock-in agenda and, trust me, Google is no charitable nest of fairy godmothers. Samsung should have backed the Android port, starting years ago. Instead they wasted ten (100?) times the money that would be needed to add a half dozen full time Libreoffice devs and chose instead to publicly embarrass themselves with fiasco Tizen. As long as LibreOffice is not on Android, Microsoft still has a corporate lock-in story to tell. End that now, or is somebody stupid?

Re:The next chapter

[FranTaylor]

The next chapter of the LibreOffice story must be "Full port to Android". It is pathetic that this has not already happened.

i know, right? Civilization is failing because we don't have full desktop publishing capabilities available while walking down the street.

Re:The next chapter

[MightyMartian]

I have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse that I've connected to both my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. On the nexus 5, the small screen real estate makes it pointless, and even on the 7" tablet I find the inadequacies of the interface and the still pretty small screen real estate do not translate into a pleasant experience for editing documents and spreadsheets. I'm sure larger tablets ameliorate this problem, but there comes a point, at least for me, where the screen size gets large enough that I'd rather just buy a notebook. I have a nice 14" HP touch screen notebook that works very well as a mobile word processing and spreadsheet development unit. I keep my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 for document review when I'm somewhere where the notebook doesn't make sense, but if I have to start bundling Bluetooth peripherals to make a pseudo-laptop, then I'd rather just use a laptop.

Re:Microsoft Office needs a competitor

[Kobun]

LibreOffice (and any other Office Suite) doesn't need to compete feature-for-feature with MS Office. It needs to compete on the value proposition to users versus Office.

In other words, performing (well) a subset of what Office 20xx does, for free, is likely good enough for a great many users.

The poor UI limits LIbreOffice.

[Futurepower(R)]

Mod parent UP!

The poor UI limits LIbreOffice.

The poor UI also limits Microsoft Office, but many people have had to learn Microsoft Office as a condition of getting a job. (Microsoft Office: Often weird, unexpected things happen.)

I talked with this man at OSCON 2015:
Robinson Tryon
QA Engineer & LIbreOffice Community Outreach Herald
The Document Foundation
qubit
(AT)
LibreOffice.org

I offered to help improve the LibreOffice GUI. He is enthusiastic about that.

My first recommendation: The icon for Italics should be a capital letter I, not, as it is now, a lower-case italic A. (An I with a top and bottom line.)

Re:The poor UI limits LIbreOffice.

[nine-times]

My first recommendation: The icon for Italics should be a capital letter I, not, as it is now, a lower-case italic A. (An I with a top and bottom line.)

I never thought about that before, but you're right. That's one of the things that's just not a good UI decision. Because first of all, just as a matter of convention, most WYSIWYG editors will use an italic "I" for "Italic", and a bold "B" for "Bold". The fact that it's a convention should probably be enough reason to continue doing it.

But beyond that, there's a good not-completely-obvious reason why that's been a convention for so long. If you're thinking about it on a technical level, LibreOffice's approach makes a lot of sense: have the formatting button icons all show the same character, but formatted based on what the button does. All of the icons have a lower-case "a", but for the "Bold" button, the "a" is bold. Makes sense, right? The button is showing exactly what it does.

But if you think about it like a UI designer, there's a good reason why you shouldn't do things this way. By using the same basic character, you end up with a bunch of buttons that look pretty much the same. Look at the LibreOffice toolbar, and you see a bunch of "a" buttons in a row. At a glance, it's not so obvious which one does what. The "Bold" icon looks kind of just like a normal "a" unless you consider it with reference to the other "a" icons around it, and then you will probably notice that it's bolder. However, the "Bold" icon is separated from the rest of the icons by the "Italic" icon, which doesn't actually look like an italicized version of the "a" from all the other icons. Instead, it looks like an "a" printed from a different font, perhaps a script font. As a result, both the "Bold" and "Italic" icons are a bit unclear.

Maybe that was too convoluted to follow. However, I can honestly say that this bothered me even before I could quite put my finger on what was bothering me. As soon as I read your post, I looked at the toolbar and thought, my first instinct at a glance would be to think the "Bold" icon was to make the font "normal", and the "Italic" icon would make turn the font to "script".

I know there are people here who will say, "So what?! Just learn to use it. It's not hard to figure out or remember which button does what." Still, a good UI will be readily understandable at a glance. By having the LibreOffice toolbar filled with similar-looking buttons, it makes it just a little bit harder to quickly pick the one you want without really paying attention.

Re:No comparison with M$ Office

[ratboy666]

The last time I looked, Microsoft Office did not come with Visio. Last time I was forced to use Microsoft Office, I had to get the IT department to order and install Visio (and Microsoft Project). LibreOffice can edit Visio material directly.

However, LibreOffice can also bring in (import) Dia material, which is my preferred "Visio-like" tool. I also use Xfig. LibreOffice can revise Visio material, such that I can exchange with a Visio user.

As to "Outlook", my preference has been Evolution (for a long time). For notes, I use Evolution, Zim, Xournal and Gnome notes.

I am not sure what "the inevitable reply" is. The software I use meets my needs. May not meet your needs, but then, you are not me. Are you trying to sell me on Microsoft Office? That is very likely a non-starter: Microsoft Office would need to be able to accept Dia drawings.