A perfect time for Apache Foundation to admit OpenOffice demise, and endorse LibreOffice instead. They recently were removed from Gentoo Linux, hopefully other distributions soon.
Because OpenOffice is hugely outdated and gets barely any updates. That's a problem for various reasons:
- MS Office compatibility, which Libreoffice invests heavily in.
- Security: from what I remember OpenOffice struggled to ship fixes to various security issues in the past years. Meanwhile LibreOffice invest quite a bit: they're able to ship security fixes fast, and have spent time fuzzing and otherwise hardening code.
- Support: if you want commercial support, LibreOffice has that (not relevant for consumers, but important for enterprise).
OpenOffice hasn't even had a major release since 2014, only very rare point upgrades. That kind of cadence speaks for itself.
I find myself agreeing with this. LibreOffice is de-facto a superset of everything that OpenOffice provides. There is no benefit to keeping these two brands alive and diluting mindshare among non-technical users who now have to be told "OpenOffice shouldn't be used, go with LibreOffice instead", which confuses them.
I think it's far better that the two projects merge and go the way of the GCC fork reunification [0] - one should remain standing as the brand, the other be folded into the main codebase. A few years ago I would have said that the remaining name should be OpenOffice, since it's more familiar and less awkward to pronounce for some English-speakers. On the other hand, Libre seems to be gaining some recognition of its own these past few years, so it's less clear-cut now.
I've used it for uni assignments the last few years. Only complaints are that sometimes I can't find the thing I need, and sometimes font rendering is weird (usually fixed by re-selecting the broken text?) Great piece of software, congrats on 10 years.
I had forgotten some of the history here. LibreOffice was forked 10 years ago from OpenOffice, which in turn resulted from Sun open-sourcing StarOffice in 2000. StarOffice itself dates from 1985! I wonder whether there is any of the original code left.
StartOffice was German and when LibreOffice was forked, a massive effort was started to translate and update tens of thousands of German comments from the code base so the new developers who do not speak the language can safely navigate and contribute.
Extremely grateful to everyone involved with its development.
It's easy to say there's a huge disparity between it and office but I've found it to be more than enough for casual users like myself, and for free too.
I don't know if this is permitted with the libre office license, but I wonder how much money it would take to just fork libreoffice and make a commercial product out of it.
For that to be viable it would have to add a real benefit that people would be willing to pay for.
Given that LibreOffice is the child of commercial software (StarOffice) that tried exactly this - at a time when the market for office software was much better - I have little hope for a commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft. Even for Microsoft the market for the desktop version seems to be dying.
That doesn't mean that apparently some have made a profit from OpenOffice and LibreOffice. I haven't seen one in a while but for some time scams that tried to sell you an unmodified OpenOffice or LibreOffice on a subscription basis were quite common.
>> For that to be viable it would have to add a real benefit that people would be willing to pay for.
does not necessarily mean:
>> [I have little hope for a] commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft.
Companies (and consumers) might have no reason to pay for the actual software itself, but they will pay for:
- Support: where support is things like fixing bugs that are encountered, producing custom builds with cherry-picked bug fixes, etc. Also, more traditional support around getting it configured in your enterprise and/or migrating your enterprise to new software.
- Feature development: so that the software does what they actually need. (Some places might do this in-house, but usually you'd just contract out to one of the companies that has developers with expertise in the codebase.)
It's a mistake to think that money can only be made by selling a product. In the open source world you generally sell services (which is tough, but there are a few companies in this space).
To anyone who is intereted in the backszory of Libreoffice and speaks German:
The Podcast "Alles gesagt" did an Interview with Marco Börris (Founder of StarOffice). Mind you the Interview is 6h long but absolutely worth it. Later Mr. Börris was working for Yahoo and was involved in Yahoos side of the Development of the first iPhone. He has some really interesting stories to tell.
As if this subject was not obscure enough to most people, the top comment redefining the go-to reference as a 6 hour interview in German is really "peak HN".
PS. Personally I love LibreOffice and mandate it on all systems in my company.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 72.0 ms ] thread- MS Office compatibility, which Libreoffice invests heavily in.
- Security: from what I remember OpenOffice struggled to ship fixes to various security issues in the past years. Meanwhile LibreOffice invest quite a bit: they're able to ship security fixes fast, and have spent time fuzzing and otherwise hardening code.
- Support: if you want commercial support, LibreOffice has that (not relevant for consumers, but important for enterprise).
OpenOffice hasn't even had a major release since 2014, only very rare point upgrades. That kind of cadence speaks for itself.
I think it's far better that the two projects merge and go the way of the GCC fork reunification [0] - one should remain standing as the brand, the other be folded into the main codebase. A few years ago I would have said that the remaining name should be OpenOffice, since it's more familiar and less awkward to pronounce for some English-speakers. On the other hand, Libre seems to be gaining some recognition of its own these past few years, so it's less clear-cut now.
[0] https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History#Reunification
There is a chart of the various other forks on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice#Derivatives
The effort lasted for years: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under-the-...
It's easy to say there's a huge disparity between it and office but I've found it to be more than enough for casual users like myself, and for free too.
For that to be viable it would have to add a real benefit that people would be willing to pay for. Given that LibreOffice is the child of commercial software (StarOffice) that tried exactly this - at a time when the market for office software was much better - I have little hope for a commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft. Even for Microsoft the market for the desktop version seems to be dying.
That doesn't mean that apparently some have made a profit from OpenOffice and LibreOffice. I haven't seen one in a while but for some time scams that tried to sell you an unmodified OpenOffice or LibreOffice on a subscription basis were quite common.
does not necessarily mean:
>> [I have little hope for a] commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft.
Companies (and consumers) might have no reason to pay for the actual software itself, but they will pay for:
- Support: where support is things like fixing bugs that are encountered, producing custom builds with cherry-picked bug fixes, etc. Also, more traditional support around getting it configured in your enterprise and/or migrating your enterprise to new software.
- Feature development: so that the software does what they actually need. (Some places might do this in-house, but usually you'd just contract out to one of the companies that has developers with expertise in the codebase.)
It's a mistake to think that money can only be made by selling a product. In the open source world you generally sell services (which is tough, but there are a few companies in this space).
https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2019-03/marco-boerries-alle...
PS. Personally I love LibreOffice and mandate it on all systems in my company.