Apache OpenOffice vs LibreOffice

[CougTek]

The fact that Apache is now responsible for the development of OpenOffice is new to me. I thought it felt into the grasp of Oracle. I don't remember Oracle absorbing Apache, but I could have missed the news.

So now we have LibreOffice on one side and Apache OpenOffice on the other. I thought LibreOffice was made by the crew who originally started OpenOffice and then drifted away when Sun was purchased by Oracle because of Oracle's poor handling of the project.

I've been using LibreOffice a lot during the last year. Version 3.5 crashed a lot before the latest release (3.5.3), but 3.4.6 has mostly been trouble-free. It feels slow though. I haven't used OpenOffice in a while, so I cannot compare the current state of both Office suites. Which one do you prefer?

 

[Chewy509]

When Oracle realised that it lost control of OOO in the fork of LO, they denoted OOO to the Apache Foundation. Oracle now has little say in the development of OOO, except they still sponsor some of the development via the Apache Foundation.

I tend to use LO mostly these days (on my netbook), and it would appear that OOO v3.4 (released today) still is missing a lot of features that LO has (namely exporting Office2007/2010 files).

My only gripe with LO, is that there are no Solaris packages for it, and reading through the mailing lists, is next to impossible to build LO on Solaris due to the many Linux-isms introduced into the LO source code. (I'm still using OOO 3.3 on my Solaris box, but using LO on my netbook - which has Arch Linux installed).

 

[Adcadet]

Anyone think OOo and LO will merge back together?

 

[Mercutio]

Much like branches of Protestantism, once there's a schism, there does not tend to be a reunification. We now have Orthodox OpenOffice and Reformed OpenOffice and I'm sure someone or other can explain in great detail why the people on the other side are heretics and they'd rather die or use MS Office than work with those people again.

 

[Chewy509]

Like Merc mentions, besides the religious licensing issues, with the work added to LO, it'll take a lot to re-integrate that work back into AOO. Mind you, I don't think there is anything in AOO, that's not in LO.

My biggest issue is when LO says it's cross platform, they mean Linux, Windows, Mac... that's it. Forget *BSD (FreeBSD pulls some major patches to build it native), forget Solaris (patches for Solaris builds have been actively regetted by LO), forget Haiku, forget any other POSIX compatible OS or 100% UNIX OS, even though they may actually have all the per-req's.

Will it happen? IMHO, you're more likely to win the local lottery.

Mind if Oracle embraced TDF (The Document Foundation who develop LO) early on, we wouldn't have this situation we have now. TDF would've taken over OOo and we would all be happier.

 

[Mercutio]

"Kids, From now on there are three ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way, and the Oracle way."

"Isn't that just the wrong way?"

"Yes, but faster."

 

[ddrueding]

Will it happen? IMHO, you're more likely to win the local lottery.

I suspect it will happen when all those OSes combined add up to >5% of the workstation population. So yes, you are right.

 

[sechs]

Much like branches of Protestantism, once there's a schism, there does not tend to be a reunification. We now have Orthodox OpenOffice and Reformed OpenOffice and I'm sure someone or other can explain in great detail why the people on the other side are heretics and they'd rather die or use MS Office than work with those people again.

Talk about mixing your metaphors.

I think that you mean to compare with the Great Schism between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, where the Pope and Patriarch of Constantinople each excommunicated the other, ostensibly making, officially, the churches that each lead heretical to the other.

This is not to be confused with the reform/conservative/orthodox sects of Judaism, which are about differences on how to adhere to the faith in the face of modernity.

 

[Mercutio]

You are asking me to care far, far too much about what people who are wrong about things think and do.

 

[Handruin]

You are asking me to care far, far too much about what people who are wrong about things think and do.

Then why bother to use a complicated religious metaphor if you aren't going to care about it?

 

[sechs]

More importantly, why try to make fun of religious stupidity and get it wrong?

 

[Mercutio]

Then why bother to use a complicated religious metaphor if you aren't going to care about it?

It's not that complicated. Protestants divide themselves over the tiniest points of ecclesiastic dogma. Which is why you can get eight or nine Baptist churches in a town of 10,000 and all of them will claim the other one is wrong.

 

[time]

More importantly, why try to make fun of religious stupidity and get it wrong?

Mercutio's analogy is accurate, he's talking about the Protestant Reformation. You seized on the words "schism" and "Orthodox" and ran down the wrong alley and up the garden path.

He's also correct in that it never ends: Australian Methodists and Presbyterians combined in 1977 to form the Uniting Church, but a third of the Presbyterians decided to go their own way, thereby splitting one church while combining two (or 3) others.

 

[Mercutio]

I think properly there's a distinction between (the) Schism and (a) schism in this usage but as I said it's really asking a lot to go looking at specifics; only one of the faithful is really going to be able to relate to whether some tiny matters of faith are important enough to create another division.

I believe that in this country we're presently seeing Episcopalians wholesale leave the mother church (the CofE?) to congregate instead with an African offshoot that does not allow women to minister or gays to marry. Because I guess ladies can't talk to god and dudes can't love each other.

Anyway, Oo.org and LibreOffice are totally just like that.