On Tuesday 25 January 2011 11:34, Joseph Apuzzo wrote:
> LibraOffice is free as in beer (aka Libra) and Open as it allows the
> contributions of the community to be accepted without corporate oversight
> of Oracle.
> The reason why OpenOffice is not progressing is mainly do to the fact that
> Oracle is gate-keeping every new feature.
There were also several problems concerning submissions to Sun before that --
submissions had to be dual-licensed to include CDDL (IIRC), copyrights had to
be attributed to Sun, and from what I've read there were some problems
concerning the forums too. Forking OpenOffice had been desired long before
the Oracle takeover, so I consider the fork mostly a good thing.
I've been running LibreOffice for a while now (it's been in the Debian
Unstable tree almost since it was first available), and even with the first
Betas I found bug fixes and other improvements over OpenOffice. They've
incorporated the OGo patches into LibreOffice, for instance. There are no
downsides to the switch from the user point of view.
>From my point of view there are realistically these reasons to use LibreOffice
rather than OpenOffice -- in order of importance:
1. New features that OpenOffice doesn't and won't have
2. Code licensing improvement (GPLv3)
3. Freedom from the umbrella of a for-profit corporation that previously
controlled submissions -- i.e. peace of mind
4. You don't have to see the Oracle logo
All that said, I still take my hat off to Sun for buying StarOffice and
creating OpenOffice from it in the first place, as well as all of the authors
and contributors since. It was both a good business strategy as well as a
huge win in the long term in the free open source software space, and solved
a problem of missing a decent office suite for Gnu/Linux. There were several
attempts prior to OpenOffice mind you, most of which were/are proprietary and
usually sub-par as well.
--
-- Chris
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
Feb 2 - Zimbra
Mar 2 - MHVLUG 8th Anniversary - Show and Tell
Apr 6 - Introduction to IPv6
