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LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off

documentfoundation.org

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Re: LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off

#11

Post by ciupicri »

ableal wrote: post #5
viraptor wrote: post #4

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

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

Re: LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off

#12

Post by mootothemax »

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

Re: LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off

#13

Post by mayank »

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.

Re: LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off

#14

Post by bhiggins »

mootothemax wrote: post #12

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.

Re: LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off

#15

Post by Hoff »

mayank wrote: post #13

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…

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...

Re: LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off

#17

Post by bnr »

sandGorgon wrote: post #3

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.

Re: LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off

#18

Post by jonpaul »

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.

Re: LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off

#19

Post by _delirium »

jonpaul wrote: post #18

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.

Re: LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off

#20

Post by nedrichards »

viraptor wrote: post #4

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?

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.

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