LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off

documentfoundation.org

74 pointsjunkbit25 comments

I never understood why I couldn't find an OO fork that trimmed all the fat, took a "Google approach", and tried to be really good at basic word processing. This includes elements like an uncluttered UI, responsiveness of pagination, collaborative editing, better fonts and design templates, maybe even web storage integration. Think college students and their needs, as a way of feeding into the next generation. Instead, we always have something that feels like poor man's Word.

IMO, this is one area where startup developers could have helped the desktop software movement by developing something that served the basic needs of a large crop of word processing users everywhere. Leave Word for the people that need mail merge or whatever.

Why? Because different folks tend to want different subsets with their tools.

This then leads to the existence of different tools for different folks, of different UIs, and (particularly for gonzo-class tools such as Microsoft Office) various attempts at progressive disclosure and adaptive UIs.

Watch how somebody else uses Office or any other complex software; the options and knobs and paths and such can be wildly different.

If you can generalize and also isolate something specific from all the different use models (and figure out how to make money between Google Tools and open source tools and Office and such), then yes, you've potentially got something. It'll probably be domain specific, though...

Abiword?

Is this legit ? as in, are there enough people from the original project's lead developers in here .

I am considering donating to their development fund, so was wondering if it was just an overly ambitious project going nowhere.

This LWN article cites several big names announcing their support: http://lwn.net/Articles/407383/

RMS, DiBona from Google, Lunardi from Novell and even Mark Shuttleworth.

It's nice that Big Names are supporting it, but for it to survive, it needs actual developers who know the codebase. I believe the actual developers are what sandGordon was referring to.

Chris is here from time to time.

Is it just me, or are the OOo .. eh, LibreOffice sources somewhat messy? Just checked out the build repo and the writer repo (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice), and I really have to wonder if this kind of arrangement is workable at all.

Now I'm not an insider, so I don't know, by from my lay-man perspective I think the first thing they need to do is clean up the repositories and project structure before anything else is done.

Well, it's got some organisation inside. inc/source/tool/data folders are pretty much standard in the whole tree. Everything is very modular. What exactly didn't you like?

On the other hand, I just found this:

    DBG_ASSERT(nTab<nTabCount,"ScPrintRangeSaver Tab zu gross");

Seriously?

It's German.

if I had to take a guess, I'd say that this code is a relic of the old Star Office days. Remember: Open Office has its root in Star Office which was bought out by Sun back in the days.

Star Office was a product by a german company. While it's really bad style to write non-english code, it's understandable that it might happen in debug code like this and if that assertion is never hit, nobody ever sees it to correct it.

"Tab zu gross" is German for "tab too big"

Good; overdue. Hopefully, this is buh-bye Sun community process crap, NIH, etc... - hello forking off github, open commmunity gOo style development. Win win, as far as I can see?

Could someone describe what's the difference between LibreOffice approach and GoOo approach now? Why didn't they build on GoOo, but forked again instead?

Good point. Judging from http://www.documentfoundation.org/supporters/ , which apparently includes Novell and most everybody, they got their ducks in a row.

However, not everybody seems thrilled at http://planet.go-oo.org/ ...

P.S. more coverage over at http://lwn.net

Damn it, another misclicked arrow on my phone. sorry about the downvote.

You forgot Red Hat and Canonical, although I don't know how much they contribute compared to Novell.

Go-OO is maintained as a series of patches which can be applied independently by distributions to add or remove features; this is intended to replace the OOo project entirely.

Or, to try and use a historical analogy, this is the tipping point from 'a patchy server' to Apache.

i've used OO only because of its Word compatibility. The root of evil here is why i needed the Word compatibility.

I use it because it runs on Linux. Also, I happen to not mind it

Maybe I'm overlooking it, but I don't see why the link is to this page. The name "Oracle" isn't even mentioned there.

Urgh, how depressing. So now we have yet another mediocre office suite being developed. If the various developers could get over the various political issues, there could be a truly kick-ass suite in action. But no - instead we have to have the free choice of several so-so suites as each team reinvents the wheel their particular way. sigh

The political issues are serious and your sense of how to solve the problem is distasteful.

Oracle has been invited to participate in the project.

Is it just me or are the alternatives on the web, i.e. Google Docs good enough? I mean, if you're going to write some long papers, you'll probably just use MS Office anyways, right? At least personally, I don't use anything now other than Google Docs.

I could see Google Docs replacing OpenOffice for me if it were available offline. An online-only document service that doesn't let me sync and edit/read offline isn't that useful to me though.

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