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Is Apache OpenOffice Finally On the Way Out? (apache.org)
Reader JImbob0i0 writes: After almost another year without a release and another major CVE leaving users vulnerable for that year the Chairman of the Project Management Committee has started public discussions on what it will entail to retire the project, following the Apache Board showing concern at the poor showing.
It's been a long battle which would have been avoided if Oracle had not been so petty. Did this behaviour actually help get momentum in the community underway though? What ifs are always hard to properly answer. Hopefully this long drawn out death rattle will finally come to a close and the wounds with LibreOffice can heal with the last few contributors to AOO joining the rest of the community.
It's been a long battle which would have been avoided if Oracle had not been so petty. Did this behaviour actually help get momentum in the community underway though? What ifs are always hard to properly answer. Hopefully this long drawn out death rattle will finally come to a close and the wounds with LibreOffice can heal with the last few contributors to AOO joining the rest of the community.
Source? That sounds like you made it up. Are these companies who don't retain attorneys?
Not to mention the name.... LibreOffice.... God, I wish I could have met the guy who first suggested that name and kick him in the balls, hard! Stupid asshole!
There are multiple large companies that straight out ban LibreOffice on their premises because of the risk that macros and document data will have to be released as GPL.
Then they deserve to have higher costs for retaining idiotic lawyers. I hope they keep it up, it'll make my company more competitive.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
MS Office will always be superior. Why use a crappy clone when the best is readily available?
sincerely I prefer the traditional UI of OO rather than the obnoxious ribbon of MS, not to mention many problems I had nn the past with MS office which I could resolve only with OOo
*best* is debatable. Vendor lock-in is a bigger risk with the potential for suddenly losing access to your data.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
just open source licenses functioning as intended.
Oracle's antics caused me to switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, not from any "GPL Purity" reasons (which I care little about) but from a reasonable suspicion that Oracle, being Evil, would soon do something I did not like.
When it was given to Apache, I'd basically consider it a toss-up between the two, but I was already on LibreOffice, and didn't have any particular reason to go back. Since then, Libre seems to be a more active project than Open, so I prefer it on that basis.
I suspect that's a lot of the issue -- People left "because Oracle" (makes Signs against Evil) they're very close to the same software, one is getting more work done on it than the other, no particular reason to prefer OpenOffice.
Hello! I am here. I am Johann, and I am recommend naming of LibreOffice at our conference of 2009.
I wonder why you wish harm on me! Perhaps you are the ass hole.
OpenOffice died the moment LibreOffice forked it. The ghost of OpenOffice.org just didn't know it was dead. When most of your major developers leave to carry on a competing project, the prior project dies.
If you mean MS-Office is more compatible with MS-Office documents (glitch-for-glitch), well, that should be obvious.
Microsoft needs competition. Without competition they get slimier and slimier, and more expensive.
And yes, MS-Office is feature-rich I will agree, but that's because they want users to get used to those features so that they don't switch brands.
The MS-Office UI is a mess in my opinion, but once you get used to where everything is, you tend to want to stick with the same brand: the devil you know.
Table-ized A.I.
Hi AC who apparently does not know that letters can be capitalized.
I use LibreOffice and OpenOffice because I don't want to buy into Microsoft's current subscription model or pay full price for the last offline release. Why do I use both? Because they both work wrong in various ways, but usually not overlapping.
Basic features work in either, but most of those work just fine in a plaintext format anyway, so that isn't saying a whole lot. I've had complex tables in text documents work in one but fail to save at all in the other. Spreadsheet behavior is different, even just the order and prioritization of recalculating fields and graph displays can make certain tasks easy in one but require careful attention in the other. I try to avoid using the other sub-components, I can use PostGres easily enough to avoid any fleeting desire to try their Access imitators, I use printouts of useful information rather than PowerPoint style slideshows, and I prefer Paint.NET for anything that might be covered in the "drawing" category.
Previously, I've also had to deal with password locked spreadsheets and scripted interactive documents, both things that neither could do at all, and I had to find someone else's computer with MSOffice to email myself a copy of the spreadsheet or fill out the document.
Completely agree. If the management there is so under-educated and stupid to think that everything done in LibreOffice must be GPL released then they absolutely deserve it.
It utterly amazes me how people that pass themselves off as leaders and higher educated are typically some of the stupidest people out there.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What business exactly gives a damn about the licensing the product is under? Unless it's a development shop looking at making and distributing modifications, and wants to be able to control whether it has to make those changes available, no business just using the software gives a rat's ass whether it's an Apache license, GPL, BSD License, or proprietary closed license. They just want the software to work and be supported.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I didn't make it up. I was told that by my Microsoft rep, and so I listened to him. Have you heard of the company, ArseKicks Software? I bet you haven't. They had to release all of their macros and document data to the public as GPL, and now they are no longer around because of it. In fact, if you Google it, ever trace of them has been wiped off of history, due to the GPL viral license.
What if a chick suggested it?
Stupid names are how open-source gains street-cred. It's why we have Gimp, PostreSql, Mozilla, and Ogg Vorbis. The more un-corporate it sounds, the better.
It's gotta sound alien, commie, and/or like medical symptoms. Extra kudo points if you cover all three.
Table-ized A.I.
I haven't been keeping up with the details of the pie fight. Apart from the licensing issue (which, for your typical end-user, is not an issue at all), what features separate Apache OpenOffice from LibreOffice.org?
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Let Open Office die. LibreOffice is much, much better!
There are multiple large companies that straight out ban LibreOffice on their premises because of the risk that macros and document data will have to be released as GPL.
Then they deserve to have higher costs for retaining idiotic lawyers. I hope they keep it up, it'll make my company more competitive.
I interviewed for a SysAdmin position at a government contractor way back in 1998 and asked about flexible working hours. The manager said their lawyers said it wasn't allowed. I said my current company, also a contractor at the same facility, had flexible hours. The manager said, "I don't know how they can do that." and I replied, "Perhaps we have better lawyers." They offered me a job, but I (obviously) didn't accept. Besides that stupidity, they only had 1 computer with Internet access, on a desk in a common area.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If you mean MS-Office is more compatible with MS-Office documents (glitch-for-glitch), well, that should be obvious.
That's only true in general within the same release of MS-Office. If you include legacy documents, LibreOffice will open more of them, and more formats overall.
Look for essential LO dependencies on systemd coming soon, and gradual death of LO on Windows.
I can completely understand these fears, but do they have a basis? What makes you think -- especially -- that LO will drop Windows?
They changed their name to "Whoooosh, Inc" soon after that incident.
Whoosh!
The MS-Office UI is a mess in my opinion, but once you get used to where everything is, you tend to want to stick with the same brand: the devil you know.
MS doesn't give a damn about users being comfortable with their software.
If they did, they wouldn't change the location of functions from one version to the next. Instead, they would just introduce new functions, and leave the old ones where they were previously.
They have to revamp the UI regularly or users won't buy into the idea that the new version is any better than the old version, and therefore be willing to pay for the new version.
LibreOffice is great, and some of its tools (I'm thinking of the change history) are in some ways better imho than MS Office.
But I wish it was more reliable. I had to subscribe to MS Office recently because LibreOffice (even the latest versions) was corrupting images in documents and screwing format around them (unrecoverable once saved), and mis-displaying basic highlighting in even very simple documents wth nothing obviously fancy. As these were contracts and things like that, some of my colleages were getting the wrong information, with quite serious consequences.
The first problem - corrupting images - has no excuse. You shouldn't be able to edit inside LibreOffice, save, load, and get back something different, no matter what quirks of file format compatibility there are.
I had to not only switch to MS Office to read documents sent, and edit documents to send, but I had to work out which branches had been edited by a colleage with LibreOffice and find the parent version that wasn't corrupted to redo all the edits on that branch.
I say "colleagues" but I'm talking about a non-profit, where I don't get paid and neither do they. To save money, my job now includes "editor of important documents like that" just because I've got "the" MS Office licence :/
Names they are trying:
Old Yeller
Titanic
Spartacus
McMurphy
Oracle (for whatever reason) has no community trust. MariaDB and other forks are getting common use and will likely see the same shift.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
I hope that OpenOffice will hand over their trade mark to LibreOffice. Especially many Windows users do not seem to know that LibreOffice exists, and are still using the now outdated OpenOffice. It would be great if the OpenOffice sites would point to LibreOffice, a worthy successor of them.
I've seen this argument before and it never made sense to me. I have a physical copy of my data. I have a physical copy of the software. If Microsoft disappeared tomorrow, I'd still have my Excel, Word, Powerpoint, and Outlook files. Why would I suddenly lose access to my data because Microsoft went away?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It's not like there's much innovation going on in the word processing arena. AOO and LO can be abandoned today and no one would notice because, magically, they'll still work.
What software and OS would you use to work with those files 20 years from now if Microsoft went away?
"They have to revamp the UI regularly or users won't buy into the idea that the new version is any better than the old version, and therefore be willing to pay for the new version."
Google (Android) and Mozilla (Firefox) have the same philosophy it seems.
Not saying that this is in fact the way the law would work, but ....
The Lawyers may actually be worried about macros and such, which they might believe would be covered under the license and require that those be put back out into the community as well. Not sure if this is an actual fact, but I could see lawyers worrying about this kind of thing and if something similar is available at the same cost that completely does away with any confusion for me on that topic, I might be a bad enough lawyer to do the same thing.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Other than "the ribbon", They've been mostly the same from one version to the next in my observation.
I don't know their rational for the ribbon, but that change sure ticked off many. I saw many prior-version how-to books in the trash shortly after. Maybe they figure it's okay to do a complete overhaul of the UI every 15 years, and live with short-term grumbling.
Table-ized A.I.
Red
Asteroid
Pussball
FTW!
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
That would be akin to saying that every web page served from a server using GPLv2 licensed Linux kernel would automatically be licensed under the same license. Or that every program compiled using a GPL licensed compilers would automatically be licensed under GPL, too. The makers of many popular GPL-licensed programs also alleviate "license scaremongering" by the use of additional permissions.
Your comment was an obvious joke, but it's not to say that many people *do*, erroneously, think like that.
-SR
The same software and OS I use now? I have a few older PCs around that still have Win95 on them... And you know, I could be proactive - such as saving them out in a different format if it looked like it may be an issue in the future. Heck, given that LibreOffice can read most of the formats - and that software is open source - I have access to the file format itself, right? So I can always directly access them if I wanted.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
That's probably McAfee scanning a Java library EVERYtime the app uses a single method from one. McAfee's default settings hate Java, and the security group doesn't understand enough to fix it. Drives people bats at work.
Table-ized A.I.
That would be akin to saying that every web page served from a server using GPLv2 licensed Linux kernel would automatically be licensed under the same license.
Yeah screw that. I'm not sharing the source code of my website with anyone!
Granted, it hasn't actually happened yet, but Microsoft clearly would love nothing better than to force you to an Office 365 subscription and to store all your data on OneDrive.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Ha! I've already got the source code of your website.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
God Lord, you're REALLY a sucker if you believe ANYthing a "Microsoft rep" tells you.... Of course, you're an AC, therefore a troll, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised at your comment...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Don't blame me. I wanted it called Officey McOfficeface.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
There seems to be hope that OpenOffice will disappear and leave the field to LibreOffice.
However, LibreOffice has a terrible name and is not alone, you will see occasionally LibreThis and LibreThat.
The issue is that 'free' in Engish may point to free as in beer and free as in freedom.
Please, Slashdot, collect suggestions from readers for a new name. Methinks LibreOffice should morph to FreedomOffice.
To answer your final question, LibreOffice is good. I've been using it for years. Admittedly before the fork I was using OpenOffice (before the fork), but switched to LibreOffice once it seemed it was actually going to be staying around.
That said, there are some compatibility issues with Microsoft Office, especially around PowerPoint, although these issues seem to be being addressed with each release. However, for personal use, I find it more than adequate.
Perhaps give it a try - it's free (gratis) as well as free (libre)!
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
You do not need to wait long. I had created a PPT file in MS Office 2003 at work that cannot be opened by MS Office 2013 for some unknown reason. The other hot topic is activation servers. As with any proprietary software that depends on activation or licencing servers, when they are gone so is your ability to install and or run that software. I see this one happening all the time with entertainment software.
When you serve a web page, the HTML markup and JavaScript is only part of the output the server generates. This output, including the markup and actual text/image content, is served to the people visiting a website, not the code that generates the output.
By having to license the output, everyone visiting a web page would have full commercial rights to the web page's content. Imagine your web page contained a novel text: anyone visiting that page could grab that novel and sell it under a GPL license. This was the issue I was replying to, and said it was not so; the output of a program licensed under GPL is not automatically licensed under GPL also.
So if I completely misunderstood your joke, please correct me. But it makes no sense to me as it is because the source code of a website and the output of that code are two completely different things.
If you share your website's full backend source on every download, you're doing something terribly wrong.
-SR
There was that going on at an electricity company I was working for in 1996 - for "quality" reasons (everything was for "quality" reasons) there was only one machine with WEB access on a desk in a common area and a booking sheet to use it.
As for NET access, we had email, and in those days ftpmail was a thing so cunning employees with email only access could send requests to an ftpmail server out on the net to email web pages, http downloads or ftp downloads. Attachment size limits were set to be very large back then.
If the GPL applied, then yes, that's right, but you don't need to put your documents under the GPL just to edit them with a GPLed piece of software. The only way they'd end up GPLed is if you deliberately licensed them as such for some reason (at which point you have only yourself to blame if you decide you didn't want to do that).
Lets just hope this happens in such a way that current OpenOffice users find out about LibreOffice.
you're assumings some things about the virtualization software in the future
assuming you can write the code, had time to write the code, yes
and assuming you'd have working hardware that could run the ancient os and code. even virtualization then might not support certain device drivers the ancient os needs
I've worked at places that had media nothing could read. like those 8.25" 10MB Iomega disks....there's two dual drive sets on eBay right now but they're non-working. can't remember what cable and card those needed, 8 bit scsi I think
and another thing, you'll have the "activation codes" when Microsoft is going to monthly subscription model and 20 years from now they'll laugh in your face when you want to activate your ancient windows?
This is why we need a "-20 million: stupid beyond belief" mod.
Oh, wait. Oracle apparently and unfortunately seems to have a highly viable financial model. The current problem is merely that OpenOffice is NOT a part of those profits.
So how about considering SOLUTIONS. At least LibreOffice got mentioned in a couple of posts, but the underlying problem remains unaddressed: Is the financial model viable? I don't know enough about LibreOffice to say, but if the economic model is as fundamentally broken, then it doesn't really matter, does it?
What about a BETTER financial model? Beating the same dead horse, but how about creating a simple mechanism for the lusers... Er, I mean the honorable users, to fund OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) with special focus on the features they actually WANT?
I just love flogging that dead horse, don't I? Even worse that the same dead horse could be used to make slashdot viable (pending its next change of ownership and debt assumption).
Yeah, of course I'm talking about the idea of the charity share brokerage where the users would buy shares in ongoing-cost projects for features they want to keep using and feature development projects for new features. At this point I can only believe that it's the breakeven idea that is anathema. Unless there are profits, no one is interested, eh?
I'd start another poll on the topic, but it seems pointless. If anyone is interested (and I'm not holding my breath), feel free to make the polite request for additional details. Meanwhile, I'll continue switching over to LibreOffice pending its demise. OpenOffice, it was nice knowing ya, and I'll try to attend the funeral if it's sufficiently convenient.
Oh yeah. One more thing. I have to express the usual disappointment with the state of today's slashdot and the lack of high-quality comments. If the charity share brokerage system were in effect, features that would improve the quality of the discussions would be my favored donations. Not sure if that means addressing the trollage or fixing the moderation, but right now there is no decision to be made because there is no such system.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Can someone explain to me what the joke was? Or maybe the funny mod doesn't mean anything? Or perhaps I also lost my sense of humor when my vote was removed?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
In my best Foghorn Leghorn impression: "That there Microsoft bit is what they call a joke, son!"
It's funny in the way Dilbert is funny.
I selected and use wps from wps.com There is a free wps Linux version. You can contribute if you think it is great. In my view it does many formatting tasks much better than LO. wps claims it has a much larger install base than does LO.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada