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Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

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Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#321

Post by davidgerard »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #12
verbify wrote: post #2

I thought everyone interested in a FOSS office suite was using libreoffice.

> libreoffice I hate that name. As a German I have no idea how to pronounce it and it's even harder for my non-techy friends. The name "Open office" has a very nice flow and everybody knows how to pronounce it, but "libre office"? They should have selected an easier name for that project.

Naming turned out to be very difficult indeed.

http://luxate.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/agreeing-on-childs-name...

tl;dr trademarks in lots of countries, URL availability in lots of countries. This stuff is hard.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#322

Post by jbicha »

chengiz wrote: post #310
keithpeter wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And another one to some extent: oOo uses its own font rendering, the LO team (I gather) moved over to using libraries (harfbuzz) available in host OS for font rendering. I seem to have better results on former under some circumstances. I have not had any round-trip editing problems flitting between the two under Linuxen of various kinds.

I didnt know this but at a more general level I am reluctant to "upgrade" what's already working fine due to this very fiddling with new stuff which is a common failing of the FOSS model in my experience (people wanting to add shiny things instead of making existing stuff better - Firefox, GNOME etc). This is one of the main reasons I did not migrate to LO.

Are you using a distro from 2010? Because I believe most of the major Linux distros include LIbreOffice as part of the default install.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#323

Post by accordionclown »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #275
ryanmarsh wrote: post #204

Why does Open/LibreOffice matter anymore? This is a sincere question. I'm well aware of why OO was a big deal circa 2000 when I was using it (if I'm getting the dates right). I cannot figure out why it matters anymore, or why it will matter in 10 years. Back when every year was going to be the year of "Linux on the desktop" the linchpin was MS Office. That's because we didn't have the million different SaaS products…

The simplest argument is that if your job requires you to share documents with other people who are used to using Office document formats as their standard exchange medium, then unless you convince those people to move away from that format -- which may require either moving everyone else they exchange documents away from that format, or treating you as a special snowflake -- you're stuck. If you're in a tech space f…

i think a fairly good benchmark is that those entities which _require_ ms-word will be the ones that tend to disappear over the course of the next 5-10 years.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#324

Post by elygre »

chris_wot wrote: post #289
jimjag wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" In fact in the past years, after the fork, LibreOffice developers regularly tracked OpenOffice source code repository and merged all the useful changes they could find, by either picking the original code or re-implementing it their own way. " And therein lies the problem... AOO was simply consumed. There was no quid-pro-quo where these were then donated back to AOO. Of course, the ALv2 does not require that, and s…

We couldn't give back. Their license prevented us from doing so.

Whose license prevented you to give code to AOo?

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#326

Post by davidgerard »

jimjag wrote: post #283
mindcrime wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I didn't say all LO developers. But from what I've seen (and to be fair, this recollection is a bit old) a lot of the LO people showed a lot of resistance to having code flow back the other way. OTOH, maybe things have changed since I formed that impression. At any rate, your willingness to do so is appreciated. As far-fetched as it sounds, I still hold out hope that one day the two projects can have an amicabl…

Sure, I didn't say all LO developers. But from what I've seen (and to be fair, this recollection is a bit old) a lot of the LO people showed a lot of resistance to having code flow back the other way I will share a story. Awhile ago I was employed by Red Hat and, as we know, Red Hat has a number of developers working on LO. I was talking w/ our CTO at the time and suggested that it would be a Good Thing if Red Hat al…

> (2) We have been told by TDF that they will not accept any of our contributions so licensed.

This claim is false, and it's a false claim I've seen you make before. If you maintain it is not, please link and quote the email that you consider substantiates it.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#327

Post by chengiz »

jbicha wrote: post #322
chengiz wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didnt know this but at a more general level I am reluctant to "upgrade" what's already working fine due to this very fiddling with new stuff which is a common failing of the FOSS model in my experience (people wanting to add shiny things instead of making existing stuff better - Firefox, GNOME etc). This is one of the main reasons I did not migrate to LO.

Are you using a distro from 2010? Because I believe most of the major Linux distros include LIbreOffice as part of the default install.

I just checked - the latest I use is centos 7.1 which does have libreoffice already installed, however my daily machine is older and I had to install OO manually there.
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