An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice Team
blogs.gnome.org
blogs.gnome.org
LibreOffice - core: "Excluding merges, 106 authors have pushed 1,064 commits to master and 4,434 commits to all branches. On master, 4,833 files have changed and there have been 78,361 additions and 54,441 deletions."
https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/pulse/monthly
apache - openoffice: "Excluding merges, 4 authors have pushed 6 commits to trunk and 8 commits to all branches. On trunk, 16 files have changed and there have been 175 additions and 118 deletions."
https://github.com/apache/openoffice/pulse/monthly
tl;dr: OpenOffice had only 8 commits by 4 authors vs LibreOffice's 4,434 commits by 106 authors in the last month
Wrong, tons of new features land in major releases. Here are the release notes for the feature-packed 5.0, released a few weeks ago: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.0
In addition to this, yes, refactoring is going on: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under-the-...
I mean that's only a loss of 4 authors for LibreOffice.
I tend not to keep up on the news lists in terms of the politics around stable software that gets the job done. I had no idea IBM pulled the plug on OpenOffice.
For my Mac laptop, I've Open Office installed. Thanks to this open letter I immediately converted to Libre Office. Thanks Christian...
I think what they mean is "IBM stopped developing their own fork of OpenOffice (called IBM Lotus Symphony) and switched back to regular OpenOffice".
"Much of OpenOffice's recent decline may be due to IBM's withdrawal from the project. An anonymous informant alleges -- and web searches appear to confirm -- that IBM did nothing to publicize OpenOffice 4.1.1 when it was released on August 21, and that, since then, IBM developers have disappeared from the OpenOffice mailing lists."
So it's not just a problem for non-technical users -- keeping track of when software you don't use on a daily basis becomes obsolete is a problem faced by everyone.
The OpenOffice/LibreOffice split made sense at the time, IIRC Oracle was being very uncooperative on the matter. But that particular problem has disappeared, and having two projects no longer makes a lot sense.
AOO has so few commits that this has basically happened.
Of course it would be helpful to redirect visitors of the OOo website, but I fear this would not happen. So the best thing would be to start a "switch to Libre Office" campaign.
WTF? No they shouldn't. How about both projects just keep moving forward in their own way, and deliver the best results they can, and let people decide what they want to us? There's no need for this kind of public smear campaign conducted between OSS projects.
Better yet, would be more cooperation between the two projects, and a dropping of whatever enmity / bad-blood exists between the two "camps".
As noted in the post, this is observably not the case.
See also this article giving the objective numbers: https://lwn.net/Articles/637735/
AOO is a dead project squatting a well-known name, to the detriment of the actual end users.
No, actually it isn't. If 0 people were contributing to AOO, that would be the case. If 2 or 3 are contributing, then what I said is accurate. As it is, there are still somewhere around a dozen active contributors as best as I can tell. That means the project is substantially diminished, but it's a long way from "dead".
AOO is a dead project squatting a well-known name, to the detriment of the actual end users.
Quit spreading FUD.
See my above comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10078640
Look at what they're doing. They are serving up a Windows installer that is known to have a serious vulnerability: anyone can send an exploit in a HWP document with a .doc file extension, and an AOO user opening it will be pwned. The AOO "devs" know this is the case.
Everyone downloading AOO 4.1.1 between April 2015 and August 2015, they have done them actual harm and installed a vulnerability on their machine.
The fix is trivial: repackage the Windows installer minus one file.
Instead of doing that one simple thing, they're posting excuses for not doing it.
(If the answer is something like “well, Apache procedures make it difficult to just rerelease an installer minus one file”, then this would not be evidence in their favour - it would be evidence that the AOO bureaucracy actively hampers the interests of users and is not fit for purpose, and that Schaller's blog post is entirely correct.)
You can’t expect people to take seriously claims that the project is not dead when they're actively harming their users by serving them software with a serious vulnerability for the past four months, and spending their time making excuses instead of fixing it.
This RFE is a healthy young teenager now and I fully expect it to outlive me. Happily I don't have so much of a need for word processing these days.
https://freedomsponsors.org/project/149/LibreOffice#/LibreOf...
Or pay one of the certified LO developers to implement it:https://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/developers/
I sponsored, loading Adobe colour palettes in 5.0 myself.
I think part of the reason I'm out of date on office suites is that I don't use them often. At work, I'm mandated to use MS Office. When I have a choice I switch between Google Docs and iCloud's office suite. Still, it's helpful to have an office suite on my laptop when I can't access a WiFi connection.
The author's point about letting OpenOffice be an important part of history is a salient one. After MS won the "Wordperfect v. Word" and "Lotus 1-2-3 v. Excel" wars, we didn't have a choice other than purchasing MS Office for a long time. For light users like me, it's not worth it to purchase an office suite I use once every few weeks. OpenOffice and their ilk has been important for people like me. (EDIT: grammar)
Corel Office included Borland's Quattro Pro, and WordPect, which Borland bought then sold Novell, which sold it to Corel. It seems Corel Wordperfect Office X3 - Home & Student Edition (PC) was launched in 2007. (1)
Lotus Smartsuite Millennium 9.0 was launched in 2008, including 1-2-3 and a bunch of bought-in programs. IBM dumped lots of copies on the market by bundling them with PCs, as part of its attempt to kill Microsoft. (2)
They probably got killed off by OpenOffice....
(1) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corel-Wordperfect-Office-X3-Student/...
(2) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lotus-Smartsuite-Millennium-9-0-x/dp...
Oracle even released a version of Oracle Open Office before giving its code and trademarks to the Apache Software Foundation.
As good as all features listed in LO release notes are LO only.
[N.B. - I've never used it, just seems it would suit your use case]
[1] https://products.office.com/en-us/office-online/documents-sp...
(And vastly superior to Google Docs, which is simply incompetent with really quite mundane .docx files.)
You probably won't get perfection, but LO is already more compatible than MS Word is with itself between versions.
Try it!
There is even a book from one of the founders about it.
If your goal is migrating users from MS office you won't have much chance but offering something they now have become used to.
I think I probably read those comment threads because it makes me feel like some kind of genius. I have the seemingly rare ability to use either the LibreOffice menu+toolbar interface or the Office ribbon interface.
That said, I don't like using LibreOffice because it's ugly (IMHO of course) and beautiful things work better.
For example the dialogues used to have to be laid out in such a way that all languages strings would fit in the space that was left. Which left them a bit sparse and odd looking. I think that conversion is all done now:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/WidgetLayout
That being said, I was mildly surprised that most people I have spoken to about this seemed to like the ribbon bar, especially non-techies (who are, after all, the main audience for MS Office).
> most people I have spoken to about this seemed to like the ribbon bar, especially non-techies
I'm a techie and I love it. The old UI now looks incredibly clunky. What really surprises me is that some people are still thinking about a change that occurred in 2007 ;-)
The discoverability is pretty much the same as the old pull-downs and toolbar approach (and how you find things is pretty much the same -- click on the category whose label seems like what you might, and then look through whats revealed by that), but consolidated into what amounts to a set of toolbars organized into tabs, rather than a combination of toolbars and menus.
(And what often gets ignores is that a lot of the improvements have been in the contextual right-click pop-up, which means what you usually need often doesn't require using the ribbon at all.)
> does everyone just use google & try to find some blog post with screenshots?
No more so than with the old interface.
One of the main points -- possibly the main point -- of the move to the ribbon was to increase discoverability, and it worked. Gates said Microsoft had lots of compliments about new features in office 2007 that had actually been in the old version, but people hadn't found them.
Microsoft did an enormous amount of work (and research) when developing the ribbon. Jensen Harris covered this in great depth in an 8-part series at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/tags/why+the+new+ui_...
I'm pretty sure you can find videos of him giving presentations about it as well. (I saw him present.)
Don't underestimate the cost of having to support two sets of UIs and to provide training for that as well. Ultimately a unified UI works best, at least for organizations, which are Microsoft's biggest customers.
The design team is focusing on improving the sidebar. It does make sense as the typical displays now have much more screen estate in the x axis. Calligra is another office suite with a sidebar.
Btw. the team is always looking for new contributors: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Team
Beautiful things appear to work better; less cognitive dissonance. The world of project management is replete with instances of software being replaced by something that looks better only to find that it doesn't actually work better (and the converse as well).
In the world of the arts truth and beauty are typically correlated, other realms of human endeavour less so.
I can live with ribbon interfaces, but I still think they were a bad idea, made all the more annoying by everyone and their grandma jumping on that particular train. But, for better or worse, it is a little late for this discussion.
AOO is just benefiting from years of hype behind OO.org, which would be fine if it had community support and was making the same sort of improvements to the code....
LO forked before AOO existed, so you could argue that https://www.openoffice.org/ should offer to link to both versions. (I'm not wholly convinced by this myself, but it would level the playing field, and more people might download the better version.)
if OSS is organic and evolutionary, we shouldn't be discussing market-share strategies. LO, keep on doin'. AOO, you keep on doin' too.
i wouldn't argue anything particular here, just would like to point out that the sentiment of the open-letter is one of coordinated community action, which emphasis on the coordinated.
if i wanted coordination, i'd join an organization, like, maybe, a company, like, maybe, microsoft. naw, i'll just keep on doin'.
This really doesn't have anything to do with market share per se.
He just thinks that marketing an inferior product with almost no community support is bad for users and bad for open source.
After googling a bit, I found some open source projects that let you host your own web office solution. It would be hard to get friends and coworkers to switch, though.