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LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

blog.documentfoundation.org

81–90 of 139 posts

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenOffice and LibreOffice already feel irrelevant and dated to begin with. It is the only non cloud free office solution which is truely free. How can this be irrelevant?

OnlyOffice? FreeOffice?

FreeOffice is proprietary software, not "truly free" in the FOSS way.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#82
post #8

As a person who refuses to use “free” cloud products, and won’t even consider Office on Windows, I’m a big fan of LibreOffice. I’ve donated a few times over the years but probably not enough. I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available. That said, my eyes crossed trying to read this. Do I need to ask an LLM to read the various messages and tell me what’s going on? ;-)

If LibreOffice ceases to exist, won't the old installers still work? Is it forkable to a new project? I seem to remember that it was Star Office then Open Office then LibreOffice.

The questionnis: How does a community form, which can take a project tof that size? TDF andjvre Office cMd out of a long process of independent (from Sun Microsystems) contributions to OpenOffice, which at some point had a momentum to do a proper form and then another momentum to take over as the lead variant.

For a successful fork you need a notable amount of people engaging in the fork.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#83
post #79
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they’re considering it a commercial endeavor, they’re just acknowledging that complex open source projects often require paid work to effectively maintain and develop them. The GNU project works because it’s a bunch of small packages that are each maintained by approximately one person each for free on their spare time. LibreOffice is a complex office suite that essentially competes with a multi-billion…

Do you consider GNU Emacs a small package?

I don't think they were talking about the size of the codebase. How much funding does emacs require to maintain?

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#84
post #70
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before Libre Office was Open Office. I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.

There is still Open Office: https://www.openoffice.org

Well, it exists but got one patch release (fixing 7 CVEs and little more) in 2025, no release in 2024, two patch releases in 2023. Not a really active project. Also most of the community moved on.

Apache OOo is dumped by Oracle and since then didn't receive much love.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#85

I wish this was more clearly written. Maybe I missed something, and I guess this is supposing the reader already has a lot of background, but there are several points that confused me. "At the time, nobody could imagine that the companies that had supported OpenOffice.org until then would create a project to kill LibreOffice." Did they mean... to kill OpenOffice? Or had supported LibreOffice would want to create a pr…

Agreed that this was written for an audience who already knows WTF is going on.

TDC is The Document Collective:

https://lwn.net/Articles/801016/

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If LibreOffice ceases to exist, won't the old installers still work? Is it forkable to a new project? I seem to remember that it was Star Office then Open Office then LibreOffice.

I think such situations are rather big risk that a community that already wasn't very active atrophies or splits and then atrophies. With code bases like that there's also a lot of maintenance so being able to run an old version is not necessarily enough.

Yeah that ability to use old code is great as an emergency escape hatch but it's not really a viable day-to-day document editing strategy.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#87

I wish this was more clearly written. Maybe I missed something, and I guess this is supposing the reader already has a lot of background, but there are several points that confused me. "At the time, nobody could imagine that the companies that had supported OpenOffice.org until then would create a project to kill LibreOffice." Did they mean... to kill OpenOffice? Or had supported LibreOffice would want to create a pr…

Agree wholeheartedly. Very confusing. If they want people to care, they need to explain the situation in a way to make people care.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#88
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about any of the drama happening, but if LibreOffice ceases to exist, there's still Softmaker FreeOffice as a free & local option. It's nothing fancy, but works for the times when I have to use one. I'm not against cloud products as you are, but it's nice being able to do stuff locally sometimes, it's just more convenient.

If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.

There are many good options for text editing, some for presentations, but what about spreadsheets? Using Python/R/SQL everywhere ain't no panacea, spreadsheets are really useful in some cases and LO has the best implementation I've seen apart from Excel.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love for someone to be able to take it from “yeah it mostly works for me” to “oh fuck you Microsoft, I’m going to move our entire company over to this”. I’m not going to hold my breath.

because thats not about quality, its about "i demand something thats 100% exactly the same as microsofts product, even in the places where its objectively crappier. I also wish it to track the microslop so that it consistently stays as shitty as microslop deems, so that I may never realize I use something else."

This is the kind of attitude that stops OSS from becoming widely adopted. If simply shipping a quality office suite was enough, this problem would have been solved last millennium. (WordPerfect fuckin' slapped) And in fact, there are many quality office suites.

Organizations choose Office because it:

1. enables interoperability with other organizations

2. has a commercial throat to choke

3. has an existing pipeline of workers trained on it

4. has a deep feature set for edge-case power-users

5. integrates with other products and services that their customers want

Every institutional office-migration project runs into these issues -- they're solvable, but damn if OSS advocates stopped pretending they didn't exist, they might actually fix them. LibreOffice/TDF is the closest anyone has gotten thus far in this regard.

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