So much for Libre Office replacing OpenOffice
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| caitlyn Oct 20, 2010 3:08 PM EDT |
It seems Oracle is moving forward with OOo. Instead of Libre Office replacing OOo as some speculated we have two competing products. I'll use whichever works better for the things I need to do. The big issue to me right now is better MS Office document compatibility. I may not like it but I need to produce, edit and read Office documents, particularly Word docs, without the formatting being turned into a jumbled mess when there are charts and tables. |
| gus3 Oct 20, 2010 4:00 PM EDT |
Daily dose of FUD: Would Oracle have done it, if Libre hadn't forked? Oracle's refusal to work with the communities means we'll never know for sure. |
| hkwint Oct 20, 2010 8:18 PM EDT |
Reading through the TODO-list of LibreOffice (noob-tasks), I'm glad the project came into existence. I heard about the "German documented" MS-Office-format filters in OOo before. Once, someone from KOffice told me how messy they were, up to the point where it was a 'wonder of the modern world' it worked in first place. "Totally unusable for KOffice", they concluded. Seems until now, nobody managed to translate the German comments, strip unneeded comments / unused code blocks, truly trust in version control AND have it all incorporated in OOo. Moreover, it seems there aren't that many unit-tests as well. From what I know, those are a crucial part of Q&A. Of course, apart from not being able to build parts separately (like nowadays is possible for KOffice AFAIK). All in all, one wonders what all the paid staff working on OOo have been doing, and if things will ever change. So if MS Office document compatibility is of interest to you, you should be glad finally some people are trying to clean the code, and have it all included / released in a reasonable amount of time. Hopefully, Oracle - too - will do a better job than Sun, which left messy code in existence for over five years. |
| Ridcully Oct 21, 2010 4:01 AM EDT |
With respect to MS Office compatibility with either OO or LO, I think it is possible to get very good results for extremely complex documents, but in my opinion OO/LO compatibility will never be perfect. Microsoft hugs its .doc binary proprietary formats to itself; it has to do that for the commercial purposes of "vendor lockin"; so no matter how the formats are "reverse engineered or investigated or whatever", the OO and LO teams can only produce catchup; and I'll take a bet that anytime OO or LO get too close in the future, Microsoft will "jemmy" the formats again. I have absolutely no idea as to how this applies to .docx which is supposed to be completely open source, but if there are problems there, then that raises other questions I am not qualified to even put on paper. I produce scientific papers for a number of journals that require their submissions to be in .doc format. These papers sometimes have complex formats but I always have produced all the drafts in OO and saved the final draft in .doc, then made a final check to see if the saved .doc file will load and be presented perfectly in a copy of MS Office running in Crossover. So far, all the documents have been perfectly formatted by OO for running in MS Office and I am absolutely satisfied with the results. My intense pragmatism says that if you have documents that are incredibly complex in MS Office and they are required to "be" in MS Office format by the recipients, then you have no choice: you have to use MS Office and to be honest, I see no problem with that. You use what works for you. For my purposes, OO (or LO when it comes out in its first stable release) is quite sufficient, but a person who is locked into Microsoft software has no such options and it's really a case of use it where you have to and back to OO (or LO) for the everyday stuff. |
| caitlyn Oct 21, 2010 10:43 AM EDT |
Well... I beg ti duffer about "perfect formatting." For something simple like a résumé, yes, I've had that result. A vendor sent a form that had to be filled out for one of my customers. It was a nine page Word document, nearly all done as tables. OOo made it look like a dog's breakfast. Mind you, this was just opening the document, before I even edited it. AbiWord did a far better job with it. If AbiWord can open it correctly the OOo or LO should as well. I've had this happen on a number of occasions. Regarding vendor lock-in: my business does not have Windows and I don't have it at home either. That doesn't change the fact that Word format has become the de facto business standard. I use PDF instead anywhere I can but in too many cases I can't if I want the business. For OOo or LO ever to really catch on they have to do a reasonable job with Microsoft formats despite all the hurdles MS throws up. OOo and LO are going to diverge since there clearly will be no future cooperation between the two. Whichever does the better job will win no matter how much the idealogues who want to hate Oracle may wish that OOo be ignored and LO be championed. |
| bigg Oct 21, 2010 10:58 AM EDT |
@caitlyn If you tell your employers where to stick it when they send you a Word format document, they'll think twice before doing business with you again. That'll teach them a lesson. |
| caitlyn Oct 21, 2010 11:07 AM EDT |
@bigg: They aren't my employers. They are my customers. I run a small consulting business. If I did as you suggest I would be out of business. The lesson they would teach me would be how to live as a pauper. Thanks but no thanks. I live in the real world and have bills to pay. |
| gus3 Oct 21, 2010 11:56 AM EDT |
One of the reasons to go hourly instead: at the end of the shift, your life is your own again. Not all benefits are monetary. Back to the regularly scheduled distraction... |
| bigg Oct 21, 2010 11:58 AM EDT |
> If I did as you suggest I would be out of business. Maybe so, but at least you'd teach them a lesson. |
| caitlyn Oct 21, 2010 12:03 PM EDT |
@gus3: I do bill on an hourly or contract basis to my customers. Assuming I continue building my consulting business that will also continue. There are definitely downsides to contracting or consulting. It can be feast or famine and it is definitely far more work to run your own business than to be a corporate employee. OTOH, there is a degree of freedom, but only a degree. Is there really much difference between satisfying a customer or an employer? I have real doubts about that. |
| Ridcully Oct 21, 2010 5:20 PM EDT |
@caitlyn...As regards "perfect formatting", I am simply telling you what I have obtained using OO. The documents involved are not "résumés" but highly complex ".doc formatted" many page documents provided online by an Australian statutory government body with rows of cells (requiring insertion of text), diagrams, images etc. OO worked perfectly and it is all I used in communicating with the relevant government body. My own produced material, as I previously indicated, is scientific studies for publishing and it contains diagrams, images, special layouts etc. Again, OO has worked perfectly in its formatting when its draft documents are tested by MS Office. When I say "perfectly", that is exactly what I mean. Nice to see you don't use Windows but I suggested MS Office running in CrossoverOffice which is not precisely the same thing. I take a different and pragmatic view however: if you MUST run Windows for some special reason, then that is what you do. Earlier this year I ended a major contract with an Australian University in which I was preparing data sheets on endangered taxa and simply had to use a piece of software which will ONLY run in Windows ~ and believe me that software package was carefully tested in Crossover Office, but without satisfactory results.....So through a perfectly legal process, a hdd was dedicated to WinXP and away the work went. Luckily, the process never required internet operation and so the computer worked quite reliably as a "standalone machine". My point here is that you use what you must to get a paying job done, and if that needs Windows, then it is what you use. Idealism has no part to play in this situation no matter how one may personally find it distasteful. Once the contract finished, that hdd was archived.......in a small anti-static bag .... and the laptop went very happily back to Linux - well, I was happy anyway :-). And yes, I agree totally with you: LO and OO will survive only if they do what the users want and receive the resulting support from an active community of users. Darwinian principles will apply and there may be a very rapid winner or there may be an extended death of one of them and that has nothing to do with what Oracle does in its little castle and everything to do with the contentment and perception of the users. In any event, even if there are "Oracle hating idealogues" and LO vanishes, there are still plenty of alternatives......I am told that IBM's offerings apparently work very, very well. |
| Ridcully Oct 21, 2010 6:18 PM EDT |
Have just seen this set of comments more or less on this same topic: http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2010102000735OPDTSW It's worth reading the (currently) second last comment by C.Whitman under the heading: Re: ..a very good point Wodin. He offers a very logical and basic reason for the forking of LO from OO. Of course, it almost certainly is not the only reason, but if his idea is valid, it does suggest (to me anyway) that a community around LO will be much happier to contribute code than the equivalent community around OO. I personally would find a demand to give up all my copyrights to my own work rather galling to say the least. |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 21, 2010 7:30 PM EDT |
Look at it from the big Linux-related companies' perspective: Even when OO was a Sun Microsystems project, it was still run by a company that sells a product (Solaris) that competes with the OS offerings of Novell and Red Hat. Maybe it's because Oracle is more aggressive about pushing into the Linux space both with Solaris and their own Linux spin, or maybe Novell, Red Hat, Canonical and others see this as a good time to have a major office suite project that's more independent in nature. So whether or not Oracle is more evil than Sun from an open-source (or general-business) standpoint, this seems as good a moment as any for the rest of the Linux world to ensure that development continues in a free and open way for OpenOffice, which remains a huge motivator for the enterprise when considering a move from Windows to Linux. By this I mean that without a product like OO, there would be one more excuse not to move away from Windows and MS Office. And given Oracle's recent actions with OpenSolaris and MySQL, a pre-emptive strike, as it were, by the rest of the Linux world seems entirely logical. As for me, between Google Docs and Abiword and Gnumeric, I really don't need OO at all these days. |
| Ridcully Oct 21, 2010 8:13 PM EDT |
A very interesting small article has just appeared on Groklaw in the NewsPicks column: [url=http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&sid=20101021120152755&title=Oracle, OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice&type=article&order=&hideanonymous=0&pid=881146#c881169]http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&sid=20101021...[/url] The title is: Rob Weir: Entire OpenOffice.org Board Should Resign PJ supports the idea as well. It certainly is a solution and has very interesting ramifications. |
| Scott_Ruecker Oct 22, 2010 12:09 AM EDT |
I am like you Steven, I am more and more using Docs than OO.o anymore. Once I upload something off my computer into Docs, that is where I go to find it. |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 22, 2010 12:21 AM EDT |
By using Google services such as Docs and Gmail, you accept that Google is going to market to you based on the content of your data. In exchange you get "free" services. I'm not 100 percent comfortable with the trade-off, but the convenience of storing and manipulating data in the cloud overshadows that concern. When it comes to development, the extra step of downloading from Google before uploading to the server saps that convenience somewhat, so I still have plenty of text files on my local drive that I work on with text editors. |
| gus3 Oct 22, 2010 12:46 AM EDT |
Quoting:I'm not 100 percent comfortable with the trade-offI'm 0% comfortable with the trade-off. |
| tracyanne Oct 22, 2010 6:20 AM EDT |
like gus3, which is why I won't use Google Docs, or Gmail. |
| Ridcully Oct 22, 2010 7:02 AM EDT |
Concur on this 100% with tracyanne.......I prefer absolutely to be in charge of my documents on my computer. Also, it's why, despite any problems with upgrading, I have remained faithful to KMail.......I **know** where my emails are and I have absolute control over them and their archiving. It's personal preferences of course, but hey......that's the world of FOSS, bless it. |
| caitlyn Oct 22, 2010 9:21 AM EDT |
I also won't use Google docs and I need to migrate off of gmail. I trust Google with my data about as far as I can throw my house, which is to say not at all. I don't want my docs mined for data and sold to whomever is interested. I also know that if I take control of my data security I have only myself to blame if that security fails. Regarding the OOs board, all the members who are not part of The Document Foundation are Oracle employees. They won't be resigning anytime soon. Why should they? OOo is going to be 100% Oracle controlled. That is obvious. Whether that is a good thing in terms of further development or a bad thing remains to be seen. |
| gus3 Oct 22, 2010 11:34 AM EDT |
Quoting:all the members who are not part of The Document Foundation are Oracle employees.That may be true now, but how many came from Sun Microsystems? |
| Scott_Ruecker Oct 22, 2010 12:35 PM EDT |
I guess I am all in, I use G-mail, Docs, Calendar etc. and I have no intention of stopping. Between LXer and my playing drums in one or more bands and most of my social life running through Facebook, I am online and staying there. When you can Google yourself is there really any pretense of 'privacy' left? I want people to be able to find me online, my career(s) depend on it. I plan on furthering my Editing and Writing skills online and hope to do something like I do here for the rest of my life. My defense of my identity is going to be that I am the only Scott Ruecker out there and that if someone tries using my info I can show that is wasn't me. My tracked buying habits and such would make me able to prove any discrepancies very easily. Oh, and I know a good lawyer who will defend me..;-) |
| gus3 Oct 22, 2010 12:44 PM EDT |
Fortunately for me, there are other, more public figures with my first and last names. Add to that, that I have been more than reasonably careful about putting my personal info online, and finding me becomes very difficult. |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 22, 2010 1:14 PM EDT |
If the Google Chrome OS represents the future - a stripped-down environment that accesses all data and apps over the wire and in the cloud, I think the biggest opportunity out there for free, open-source operating systems is an environment in which the Linux-driven client uses a variety of apps locally but with both the local filesystem and a cloud-based filesystem that allows the user to access their documents from any number of workstations, except not on Google's infrastructure but instead via a cloud service that might not be free as in beer but also doesn't mine your unencrypted data. I suppose that Ubuntu One (and to an extent Dropbox) is a step in this direction, but I'd like to at least see the option of an easy-to-install and -use mechanism by which a users files are stored in encrypted form and easily accessed by both web-based and local applications. Like I say somewhere in this thread, I still keep a lot of local files because it's too much of a pain to download from Google Docs then upload to wherever that particular file needs to go. |
| hkwint Oct 22, 2010 1:25 PM EDT |
Quoting:OOo is going to be 100% Oracle controlled. That's where all of it stops making sense. There's Oracle OpenOffice, former StarOffice and Oracles proprietary office suite. Then there's OpenOffice.org, the community office suite without a community, 100% Oracle controlled. And there's LibreOffice, a community without a company. Then why the heck would Oracle continue with their community-less community edition which does everything it can to get rid of the last remainders of the community? Why don't they just ditch it and only continue with their proprietary StarOffice - now OOO? Would they keep OOo flying only because they're afraid to loose their faces otherwise? That wouldn't be an Oracle-thing to do, since it's all about the money. I see it like this: They kept OOo alive since they hope it will provide them with some gratis R&D for their Oracle proprietary office suite. However, now the community left - and they can't steer the Liberated-community to develop for enterprise needs anymore - that hope is idle. Furthermore, it seems they'll focus on their Oracle Cloud Office. As a result, I think if someone would have to replace OpenOffice.org within a year from now, only candidates are O(racle)OO or LO. But - as anybody probably knows by now - most of my predictions don't come through, so y'all can sleep well. |
| caitlyn Oct 22, 2010 2:04 PM EDT |
I think OOo has a future is Oracle sees having a free office suite as something it can leverage or something that helps with its commercial customers. Before Sun there was an independent company, Star Division, producing a *proprietary* office suite, originally for the OS/2 platform and then Windows. That was Star Office. Taking the suite open source came years later. Some of the OOo board dates from those days. Their interest is in the office suite but not necessarily in Open Source. Some are FOSS advocates, some are not. @hkwint: OOo still has a user community and I suspect they will have no problems developing and keeping a community. To say they have "no community" is a stretch. |
| gus3 Oct 22, 2010 3:23 PM EDT |
caitlyn, in light of this:Quoting:Before Sun there was an independent company, Star Division, producing a *proprietary* office suite, originally for the OS/2 platform and then Windows. That was Star Office. Taking the suite open source came years later. Some of the OOo board dates from those days. Their interest is in the office suite but not necessarily in Open Source.I wondered earlier, if loyalty to the product, rather than the company, is at play here. Of all the tech companies I worked for, about half of the programmers were loyal to the product(s), hanging on even when the executives were being ignorant butt-heads. Do you think that's a reasonable consideration here, or am I being superstitious? OTOH, I wonder what you're smoking when you say "OOo... will have no problems developing and keeping a community." Those who don't care except for expedience, probably aren't part of the community; those who do care, at least enough to follow the news about it, are feeling a tad uncomfortable lately. Anyone reading these boards knows I am one of them. |
| caitlyn Oct 22, 2010 5:18 PM EDT |
@gus: Yes, product loyalty, especially to a product you've personally had a hand in developing, is very strong and I do believe that is a factor. For others it may just be a matter of keeping their jobs with Oracle. I am an example of someone who advocates FOSS because it is the proverbial better mousetrap, not because I particularly believe in what FSF or other ideologues are selling. Expediency? Nope, it's pure pragmatism. People will want whatever product works best. The ideologues are a very vocal but rather small minority. You know why Oracle's database products are so successful? Show me an FOSS product that can do what Oracle can do. You can't. Yes, I know about MySQL and PostgreSQL. Both are nice but much more limited products. |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 22, 2010 5:47 PM EDT |
I have a copy of StarOffice, circa 2003, for Solaris 9 SPARC. I actually got it to install once, too. My last attempt to do this didn't work. The time I was able to load and run it, StarOffice actually ran better than most apps on my Sparcstation 20 with single 50 MHz SPARC CPU and 256 MB RAM. |
| bigg Oct 22, 2010 6:01 PM EDT |
> You know why Oracle's database products are so successful? Because they've been at it for 30 years? Because of lock-in? Because Larry Ellison recognized early on that Linux was good for Oracle, so he made sure it ran well on Linux, so there was not the same demand to develop a FOSS substitute like with most products? Because writing a database is one of the toughest programming tasks? I don't think any of those apply to OOo, however. |
| gus3 Oct 22, 2010 6:35 PM EDT |
Quoting:Because Larry Ellison recognized early on that Linux was good for Oracle, so he made sure it ran well on LinuxActually, the Oracle database runs well on well-tuned Unix systems in general. It's Windows that gets short shrift from Oracle. Yeah, OraDB will run on Windows, but platform issues (imagine that) make it less than satisfactory for long-term production use. |
| hkwint Oct 22, 2010 6:39 PM EDT |
Hehe, I can't remember the last time Oracle successful managed a community. Only time will tell I guess. The fact Oracle is 'firing' community members pretty much shows OOo is not a community project, but an Oracle project. Which is exactly why the current LO-community was dissatisfied with Sun: In a community project, the community decides. If not, it's no community-project. You might have noticed North Korea calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" (and so did the DDR). You know why they are democratic? Not because the people rule the country, but because their leaders _say_ their project is democratic, and if you disagree, you're "out". Have to add, I hope you're right Caitlyn, it will keep existing, getting better, compete with LO and everybody will sing Kumbaya. Last time I hoped such a thing while I should have known better, was when Microsoft announced MS Office was going "open standards", and started ooxml. |
| flufferbeer Oct 22, 2010 9:47 PM EDT |
Haven't been on LXer threads in awhile, but am hopping onto this one. I'd keep away from LibreOffice's beta-coding entanglements. Besides; it seems to me that a good strategy for the time being is to install BOTH OOo and AbiWord on PCs. Especially true if resources such as memory and hd space are fairly limited. A brief comparison here. - AbiWord download for Losedow$? 8 MB Great and fast for everyday use - OOo download for Losedow$? 148 MB for v3.2.1, probably not significantly more than this for RC 3.3.0 Excellent for practically anytime you just don't wanna have to install the latest M$ Office "fix/patch/update/...." , yet you absolutely MUST interconvert your data with M$'s everincreasingly twisted file-formats. - LibreOffice Beta 2 Internationalization download for the same O$? (Priceless) No it isn't, it is actually a whopping 318 MB UNexpanded download! In addition to other negatives about LibreOffice, I'm curious how the Document Foundation homepage writes that it "is open to any individual who agrees with our core values and contributes to our activities." If an individual contributes absolutely nothing at all to the Document Foundation's activities, does this mean that the Document Foundation's software (LO) is NOT open??? Just wondering..... -fb |
| caitlyn Oct 23, 2010 12:22 AM EDT |
I think it is fair comment to say that OOo will likely no longer be a real community project. I do NOT think it is fair comment to claim that Oracle is the equivalent of Microsoft. Microsoft wants to destroy both Linux and FOSS. Oracle develops on Linux and sells for Linux. They sort of have their own distro. (It's really rebranded RHEL with a custom kernel.) They leverage FOSS to their own advantage. That makes them more like IBM or Sun prior to purchase than like Microsoft. Look, if you want to hate on Oracle I won't get in your way. Hatred is an emotion so facts and logic have nothing to do with it. |
| tracyanne Oct 23, 2010 6:09 AM EDT |
I think we need to wait and see where Oracle is going to take OO.o before we got all red in the face and calling them names. It is just possible they will give OO.o the TLC it needs. |
| hkwint Oct 23, 2010 8:05 AM EDT |
TA: Thanks for bringing peace today! Fluffer: Interesting. One of the goals of LO seems to be, making it possible to only download OOWriter. Than it should be 40-70MB or so, I'm not sure, at least much less. One of the reasons OOo is so big - as I've stated before - is because it's full of useless comments, unused codeblocks and 'mechanisms which are ought to be handled by version control, and not by code itself'. Once, in the 1.x era, I found myself compiling whole OOo on my 1700mHz/256MB desktop - because a binary wasn't available on FreeBSD, so I know the headache that 148 MB brings. The thing was compiling for over 12 hours or so, including manual Java download. Then it had an error which I couldn't solve and halted. Bummer! Caitlyn: While I fully agree to your post, this is what strikes me: Quoting:I do NOT think it is fair comment to claim that Oracle is the equivalent of Microsoft. Microsoft wants to destroy both Linux and FOSS. Didn't meant to claim they're equivalent, though I see other people might understand so. I was only digging up good ol' memories of the last time I believed in fairytales, but anyway: I thought you were the rational one! Of course Oracle and Microsoft are equivalent, both are trying to create shareholder value in every way possible! Can't blame them for doing their job, that's what companies do. So why would someone hate them? I don't hate Microsoft too, only some of its behaviour (OK, if I have to be honest: their leader is an ugly garden-gnome and I rather not look at him) and some corrupt / stupid politicians who listen to them. Then those politicians are representing big companies instead of the people which voted for them, the ones they're _ought_ to represent. Hey, what else is new, and who cares about how I think about these issues anyway. I certainly don't hate Oracle, but one has to remember all they care about is money. So if you want to say sensible things about OOo, you have to think as shareholder. I was wondering why they will have three office versions (community, proprietary and cloud). If I was a shareholder and knew "an essential part of the community walked", I'd say they have to consolidate. Which means ditching the community version - or if ROI is too low and Oracle CloudOffice fares better, ditch OO entirely. But I'm too poor to have any shares, so instead I'm just a Linux user. Happily using both OOo (don't even know which version) and Oracle-stamped VirtualBox. However, I belong to the scary type, and Oracle doubting about the long term viability of OOo (even though they don't say so, they'll keep the orchestra playing until water is in the tuba) seems like a good reason to explore alternatives and be ready to abandon ship. Using the most "open" software also makes me feel more noble, but nobody besides me would care anyway. From experience, I can tell you OOo is still lots better than KOffice 2.1 (though I have to thank the KOffice team for working so hard), which at the moment is the only reason I still have OOo. But Abiword, yeah, that would be an interesting alternative. Maybe this desktop needs more Gnome and less KDE; have been thinking this for longer. ed: OK, speaking about comparisons, OOo seems more like Symbian. Still leader in market share, companies behind it say they still support it, but people are leaving, development efforts are decreased, users are in fear, are uncertain and doubting, and icebergs ahead. But at least the tuba keeps playing! |
| gus3 Oct 23, 2010 12:33 PM EDT |
@hkwint: Funny you should bring up the RMS Titanic. The conventional wisdom goes that the lookouts and the captain acted too late, and missed their opportunity to take evasive action. But it was precisely by acting how and when they did, that guaranteed their doom. It was designed to stay afloat with four bow compartments flooded, and smacking an iceberg that big probably would have flooded four compartments. There was a "window of opportunity" of about twenty seconds, in which a hard turn in either direction would have resulted in a broadside impact along more than four compartments. Unfortunately, that's exactly what the captain ordered. That from hkwint, TA's comment about "wait and see," and caitlyn's "stop the hate." Color me suitably chastened. |
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