CrunchBang Linux Forums » Off Topic / General Chat » libreoffice - any thoughts
Hi guys -
With all the talk about oracle domination, it seems really cool that libreoffice has forked of. Personally I hope (because I am easy to get on the bandwagon without giving things any thought) that libreoffice will go out of beta and hurry in to the debian repos and crunchbang. What are your thoughts - if any :-)
See http://www.documentfoundation.org/
A
my understanding at the moment the libreoffice is only in beta while they remove openoffice specific branding and links so the first release will probably be identical to openoffice. The big gains will come in the future, Openoffice was quite well known for being difficult to contribute to, so hopefully this will increase development significantly, i'm assuming they don't require copyright transfer etc.
I do wonder though, what will happen to go-openoffice, does anyone know where this now fits in.
I am not happy about this.
Such a fork will lead in my opinion to incompatibilties and confusion.
Eg. Icedove is not the same as Thunderbird - Add-Ons are not compatible/available ...
Just my 2 cents
While I agree that a fork will add to confusion - short term - I think it has to be done. Look at what has already happened with Java since Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. I hate to quote a Vermont licence-plate, but "Live Free Or Die" may be the only way to go here...
I do wonder though, what will happen to go-openoffice, does anyone know where this now fits in.
Supposedly the improvements in Go-oo will be included in LibreOffice.
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/
Since the Oracle's takeover of Sun, we are seeing this with all the former Sun open source projects. Happened with opensolaris, now openoffice, may be virtualbox and Java, the next ones? In any case is great to see that no company can stop the open source software and its community. Though, it's a little sad to lose Sun which had been such a great contributor.
Sun Microsystems always sort of struck me as this geek-hippy friend who never got it that in business, sometimes you have to be a jerk - even to your own. Microsoft figured this out really early in the game, and currently, Apple via Dictator-for-life Jobs, is showing they they understand to concept, too.
But for every Jobs, there's a Woz. For every Gates, there's a Linus.
Unfortunately, in business, you have to make a profit...
This is slightly off topic, but since the Libre Office question was raised, I was wondering if there was anyone who had used Open Office, Go-oo and Lotus Symphony ... do any of them have any major advantages over another? Something about Open Office didn't sit well with me (I found the UI too Word-esque, I think) so I am hunting for alternatives ...
If you want a different UI then try Lotus Symphony. Go-oo is almost the same as OpenOffice so you won't see much difference.
Of the ones in your list I have only used OpenOffice. I prefer it to MS-Office because it's UI is, I think, more straight forward. Something simpler still would be better but I need an OS-agnostic office suite.
If you don't need spread-sheets, drawing tools etc you might find Abiword or LyX to your liking.
Abiword is said to be easier on both user and computer resources. I have not used it though so I can't vouch for it.
LyX is a bit different but I like it. It is definitely not Word-like. Your writing is not distracted by WYSIWYG.
/Martin
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CrunchBang Linux Forums » Off Topic / General Chat » libreoffice - any thoughts
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