y did they remove open office for libreoffice?

[Malik]

Libreoffice looks terrible, i feel like im stuck in windows 95. I liked open office a lot and was suprised when i saw it was taken off. Does anyone why?

[sffvba[e0rt]

LibreOffice came into existence due the the uncertainty of the future of OpenOffice a while back... this is also a big motivation for the switch the LibreOffice that most distro's have made.


404

[kaldor]

You like OpenOffice more? Weird, seeing they are the near-identical thing.

The UI is a common bug. It's easily, fixed though. Run this command:


sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gtk

Should fix it.

As for why they removed it, check this from Wikipedia:


On 28 September 2010, several members of the OpenOffice.org project formed a new group called "The Document Foundation". The Document Foundation created LibreOffice from their former project, over concerns that Oracle Corporation would either discontinue OpenOffice.org, or place restrictions on it as an open-source project, as it had on OpenSolaris.

[KiwiNZ]

Libreoffice looks terrible, i feel like im stuck in windows 95. I liked open office a lot and was suprised when i saw it was taken off. Does anyone why?

The desire to make a big mistake to compound a bigger mistake that was brought about by group narcissism.

[HackNewton]

Hi Malik,
Well as you may know OpenOffice.org project were lead by Programmer Community. These project initially funded by Oracle Group. But from some time the orcle foundation were looking to discontinue the OpenOffice project or putting restrictions on Open Source Distribution of OpenOffice. So as the result open office project community decided to build a new community and continue the project under LiberOffice.
As now You may noticed why new LiberOffice is suffering to Not so good looking face.

[sffvba[e0rt]

You like OpenOffice more? Weird, seeing they are the near-identical thing.

The UI is a common bug. It's easily, fixed though. Run this command:


sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gtkShould fix it.

To be honest I was not aware their is a bug (maybe I am not affected by it... (maybe I should run it just to be sure... I have always found OpenOffice/LibreOffice to be ugly personally :))


404

[Legendary_Bibo]

To be honest I was not aware their is a bug (maybe I am not affected by it... (maybe I should run it just to be sure... I have always found OpenOffice/LibreOffice to be ugly personally :))


404

It looks fine to me, but I found out that someone made a Faenza icons theme for Libre Office so I'm going to install that to uphold consistency, and with 3.4 coming out we finally get global menu support. I find a consistent theme to be a thing a beauty, and if something doesn't follow it, I find it annoying. Windows and KDE apps being the exception.

[Malik]

You like OpenOffice more? Weird, seeing they are the near-identical thing.

The UI is a common bug. It's easily, fixed though. Run this command:


sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gtk

Should fix it.

As for why they removed it, check this from Wikipedia:
i cant even tell if anythings changed. Is there a before and after picture of this?

[kaldor]

i cant even tell if anythings changed. Is there a before and after picture of this?

What version of Ubuntu are you running?

Here's how mine looks..

Edit @ 404:

If you have 11.04, it should look fine. If you downloaded it separately, there's an extra package to be installed. Not a "bug" but an inconvenience and extra step.

[sffvba[e0rt]

What version of Ubuntu are you running?

Here's how mine looks..

Edit @ 404:

If you have 11.04, it should look fine. If you downloaded it separately, there's an extra package to be installed. Not a "bug" but an inconvenience and extra step.

:popcorn: /me strokes his Natty install and it purrs back at him contently...


404

[sffvba[e0rt]

The desire to make a big mistake to compound a bigger mistake that was brought about by group narcissism.

Care to clarify? What exactly was the mistake?


404

[KiwiNZ]

Care to clarify? What exactly was the mistake?


404


Splitting Open Office into two camps. Ever heard of "divide and conquer"

Open Office was one of the success stories of Open Source. Splitting the resources was a crazy idea the group that split to form Libre Office mande a huge mistake.

[Bandit]

I agree with Kiwi, splitting is bad. But at the same time there was being very little done to continue developing OpenOffice.
But why is Ubuntu using Libre, well for one Calc is slightly more compatible with Excel and the devs that left the project want to continue developing it at a faster pace to continue to compete with MS Office.

Thats why..

[kaldor]

Splitting Open Office into two camps. Ever heard of "divide and conquer"

Open Office was one of the success stories of Open Source. Splitting the resources was a crazy idea the group that split to form Libre Office mande a huge mistake.

I disagree on the success part. Nobody I know uses it, and everyone has given me the same "oh god, not that" reaction when I say I use it.

Firefox is an example of success; it's extremely popular and commonly seen.

OpenOffice seemed to just be stagnating with Oracle. The Document Foundation saved it from stagnating, and gave it more hope. Sucks that it doesn't have a large company behind it now, though.

[forrestcupp]

Splitting Open Office into two camps. Ever heard of "divide and conquer"

Open Office was one of the success stories of Open Source. Splitting the resources was a crazy idea the group that split to form Libre Office mande a huge mistake.

My perception was that the people who started The Document Foundation were basically forced out because Oracle didn't want to put any effort and resources into OpenOffice.org, then later Oracle changed its mind. So as a result, now we have two teams working on basically the same thing. In my opinion, it's Oracle's fault and not The Document Foundation's fault.

[LowSky]

Splitting Open Office into two camps. Ever heard of "divide and conquer"

Open Office was one of the success stories of Open Source. Splitting the resources was a crazy idea the group that split to form Libre Office mande a huge mistake.

It was a pseudo success when Sun was running development but was starting to go bad when Sun went looking for a buyer. Oracle did what they always did with projects, they saw little to no return on their money spent and wanted to rein in the project and have more control on what went out. The problem came from Novell, IBM, Canonical, Red Hat, and the community. Most of the big name Linux distributions were using Novell's added packages version to begin with, Oracle didn't want this, and so the split started.


My perception was that the people who started The Document Foundation were basically forced out because Oracle didn't want to put any effort and resources into OpenOffice.org, then later Oracle changed its mind. So as a result, now we have two teams working on basically the same thing. In my opinion, it's Oracle's fault and not The Document Foundation's fault.

I blame Sun for not open sourcing OpenOffice completely years ago. It would have saved OO.o years ago and development for new releases would have occurred faster.

[lykwydchykyn]

As I often find myself pointing out:

- What used to be called "OpenOffice.org" in the repositories was *NOT* OpenOffice.org. It was OpenOffice.org with the Go-OO and debian patch sets applied. To my knowledge, this goes well back to the 2.x versions.

- When LibreOffice split off, the go-oo patch sets, as well as patch sets from debian, red hat, and many others were some of the first changes merged in.

- The Go-OO project is now officially deprecated in favor of LibreOffice, and most of its primary coders (e.g. Michael Meeks) now participate in LibreOffice development.

So, basically, the biggest difference between OpenOffice.org from Sun/Oracle/Apache/Whoever owns it now and LibreOffice are things you already had if you were running the version in the Ubuntu repositories.

What changed is the name and the branding. To have stayed with the codebase called "OpenOffice.org" would have been to introduce regressions as the features and fixes in the Go-OO version would have been lost.

[beew]

Splitting Open Office into two camps. Ever heard of "divide and conquer"

Open Office was one of the success stories of Open Source. Splitting the resources was a crazy idea the group that split to form Libre Office mande a huge mistake.

If there is any resource to split. How much resource did Oracle put into OO.O or planned to?

No, it is never the fault of always benign corporate entities, if developers refuse to take it lying down then it must be their fault. Corporations are just so wronged by the ,"narcissistic" paranoid people.

LibreOffice is a very positive development, it is an example of the people who actually do the work taking over the destiny of the project instead of begging for its survival from a single corporate master and now it is also genuinely open as codes from all contributers are encouraged, not treated as suspect and rejected because of company's vested interest. That is getting new resources.

[BrokenKingpin]

My perception was that the people who started The Document Foundation were basically forced out because Oracle didn't want to put any effort and resources into OpenOffice.org, then later Oracle changed its mind. So as a result, now we have two teams working on basically the same thing. In my opinion, it's Oracle's fault and not The Document Foundation's fault.
This exactly. Will be interesting to see if the two projects merge again at some point.

[trollolo]

openoffice started some nonesense with a paid version or something like that, so they're not hipster enough.

also, lol at a linux user complaining about the GUI, been a while since i've seen that.

[JDShu]

Splitting Open Office into two camps. Ever heard of "divide and conquer"

Open Office was one of the success stories of Open Source. Splitting the resources was a crazy idea the group that split to form Libre Office mande a huge mistake.

The development pace of LibreOffice is far faster than OpenOffice was before it. It seems to me that we had a net benefit.

[KiwiNZ]

The development pace of LibreOffice is far faster than OpenOffice was before it. It seems to me that we had a net benefit.

Please quantify

[forrestcupp]

openoffice started some nonesense with a paid version or something like that, so they're not hipster enough.
Actually, StarOffice was the original name of the commercial suite, and it existed before OpenOffice.org. A little later, they opened up the code of StarOffice to allow the free, community driven version, which coexisted with the commercial StarOffice. When Oracle took over, they renamed StarOffice to OpenOffice, without the .org, to confuse everyone. That's about the same time they appeared to show their lack of interest in the free community version.

It's not like out of the blue, OpenOffice.org became a paid software suite. The paid version was around first.

[JDShu]

Please quantify

Seems enough to see that we're getting libreoffice updates at a regular basis and we get a wealth of new features (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History). They also plan to have major releases every 6 months, embracing the idea of "release early, release often" in open source. We also know that The Document Foundation has been able to leverage the wider open source community to do clean ups and housekeeping with the legacy Sun code, similar to what the Linux kernel does.

But if that is not enough, here's a code analysis from Ohloh:

http://www.ohloh.net/p/libreoffice/analyses/latest (http://www.ohloh.net/p/libreoffice/analyses/latest)

If you look at the commits, under Sun there were massive code drops (not a good sign) and there was stagnation in 2009, when Oracle acquired Sun.

More telling, the number of commiters increased by more than half when LibreOffice was announced.

Perhaps it's too early to say whether the momentum will sustain, but to me it definitely beats the situation before.

[ninjaaron]

Splitting Open Office into two camps. Ever heard of "divide and conquer"

Open Office was one of the success stories of Open Source. Splitting the resources was a crazy idea the group that split to form Libre Office mande a huge mistake.

As far as I recall from my reading when the whole thing went down, pretty much the entire development community, project leaders included, broke away from oracle completely. The community didn't divide, it just left the parent organisation.

Anyway, the major players in open source (Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, and a little dot-com startup called Google) are all supporting Libre-Office now.

Basically, LibreOffice is the same thing as OpenOffice, but it's not owned by Oracle or any other corporation. I'm not really sure, but I think this may be better. The fact that it has corporate backing while being community controlled sound promising, at any rate.

[forrestcupp]

Basically, LibreOffice is the same thing as OpenOffice, but it's not owned by Oracle or any other corporation. I'm not really sure, but I think this may be better. The fact that it has corporate backing while being community controlled sound promising, at any rate.

Now its owned by The Document Foundation. ;)

It'll be better as long as The Document Foundation keeps it community controlled and doesn't get cocky like Oracle. But Oracle is a business wanting to make money and the foundation isn't, so we're probably ok.

[lykwydchykyn]

The chart speaks volumes, was made yesterday:

http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/07/26/a-glimpse-at-our-developer-community/

A few things to notice:

- Document foundation started in september 2010. Notice the immediate rise in new and non-Oracle contributors.

- Notice the sharp drop in Oracle contributions in April, which tapers to nothing at the end of the graph. (which ends at June, when Oracle donated the code to apache).

- Notice that new contributors are the majority by far.

Draw your own conclusions, but if you ask me the *only* thing OpenOffice.org has going for it now is some tepid support from IBM and a bit of name recognition.

[mips]

The desire to make a big mistake to compound a bigger mistake that was brought about by group narcissism.

The reasons for forking to Libre Office were very valid and still valid to this day.
For now abiword & gnumeric does all I require.

[Mr. Picklesworth]

Splitting Open Office into two camps. Ever heard of "divide and conquer"

Open Office was one of the success stories of Open Source. Splitting the resources was a crazy idea the group that split to form Libre Office mande a huge mistake.

But Ubuntu didn't ship vanilla OpenOffice; we shipped something much closer to what LibreOffice is today. (OpenOffice + a whole lot of patches). So, if you're going to make this statement, you'd better be able to explain why this matters now and it didn't matter when we were shipping Go-OO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo).

[Ric_NYC]

I had both installed. LibreOffice starts faster than OpenOffice. That was one of the things I didn't like about OO it seemed to be a memory hog.

I also have a feeling of OpenOffice been abandoned by the comunity.

[Artemis3]

Open Office was one of the success stories of Open Source. Splitting the resources was a crazy idea

For the same reason xfree and xorg split. Once upon a time, every single distro used xfree86, and everyone has forgotten it already.

Forks are not necessarily bad, sometimes they are necessary for advancement. Yes, Libreoffice fixed a lot of bugs which where pending OO.o bugs for years, and many were simply never resolved.

This is one of the natural ways Free open source software works, and always, there are people who criticize this "waste of resources", when in fact is one of its virtues. Don't like something? Upstream can't be bothered with? Fork! Either your fork succeeds on merit, remains niche or disappears in the attempt.

Openoffice, like xfree, stagnated too much, for too long. Oracle didn't exactly help either, and now that its worthless (thanks to Libreoffice), it was given away to Apache.

Ubuntu can be considered itself a fork of Debian, and Mint a fork of Ubuntu, and so on. This is something you should be getting used to already. Shuttleworth could have tried changing Debian mentality, and perhaps hit a wall. Think the same happens elsewhere, this is a natural result; it's one of the 4 freedoms: modify to suit your own needs, another to distribute your modifications...

[kaldor]

I had both installed. LibreOffice starts faster than OpenOffice. That was one of the things I didn't like about OO it seemed to be a memory hog.

I also have a feeling of OpenOffice been abandoned by the comunity.

LibreOffice has a lot of performance improvements and cleaned out a huge lot of legacy code, apparently. There's less bloat under the hood, so things should be speedier.

[HoKaze]

Anything I would have said has pretty much already been said: the fork was a good decision, we can physically test the improvements, Ubuntu (and several other distros) didn't use vanilla OpenOffice anyway and OO has pretty much been abandoned now

[tadcan]

Oracle has given open office to the apache foundation, it is currently in the incubator program. IBM uses open office as its base for Lotus Symphony, so have an interest in keeping it going.

http://incubator.apache.org/projects/openofficeorg.html