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

[FranTaylor]

And when the teacher assigns a PowerPoint presentation to be created

fuck me, the world really is coming to an end

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

[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.

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.)

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: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 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.