Submitted by “The Apache OpenOffice Project today announced the availability of Apache OpenOffice 3.4, the first release of OpenOffice under the governance of the Apache Software Foundation.” I don’t think OpenOffice could have ended up in a better foster home.
“The Apache OpenOffice Project today announced the availability of Apache OpenOffice 3.4, the first release of OpenOffice under the governance of the Apache Software Foundation.” I don’t think OpenOffice could have ended up in a better foster home.
I thought most/all the OO devs had flocked to LibreOffice because of Oracle being lame, which I assume meant OO would be left to rot.
If they’re both still being developed separately, why would somebody choose one or the other? Seems like they’d be more productive combining their efforts.
It was sort of the other way around: most of the OOo devs were paid by Oracle and when LO forked most of them lost their jobs and are not working in OO anymore. A few were hired by RedHat to work on LO and some other were hired by IBM to work on AOO but the vast majority of them are working on other things.
Both projects have been cleaning the code in orthogonal ways but AOO has been more conservative as they will bring in a lot of code from IBM’s Lotus Symphony.
One is copyleft (LO) and the other copyright (AOO)
I suspect that while both suites are fairly similar in function now, they will probably slowly grow apart. In a few years I wouldn’t be surprised if LibreOffice becomes a fast-moving, mostly Linux-oriented project, while OpenOffice takes a more conservative “for enterprises” approach. Sort of like the difference between Fedora and RHEL, two products with strong similarities, but different focus.
Except that Fedora is a testbed for RHEL, not the other way around.
OpenOffice is now Apache licensed while LibreOffice retained the original OpenOffice LGPL license.
That means that OpenOffice is at a disadvantage because any big, killer features in OpenOffice can be ported to LibreOffice but not vice-versa.
Edited 2012-05-08 23:31 UTC
That sort of misses my point.
Besides which, LO could still be a test bed for features that eventually could make it into AOO. The actual code may not flow from LO to AOO, but the features, the ideas, could be copied if they were found to be successful. Lots of open source projects copy features without using the same code.
That statement needs to die a trillion death. Fedora is the base for RHEL much like Debian unstable was or still is the base for Ubuntu
So… it needs to die a trillion deaths because it’s wrong in such a subtle way that I can’t tell the difference between what I said and what you said even with you pointing out its existence?
Never mind. I must’ve still been waking up.
I’m assuming the distinction you’re referring to is that it’s wrong to call a beta version a “testbed” for the release that will result from it?
I’m not really sure I agree, but I see your point.
(RHEL and Ubuntu aren’t merely Fedora and Debian Unstable debugged, so one could argue that, from a certain perspective, they’re testbeds. RHEL and Ubuntu let the Fedora and Debian Unstable guys act as guinea pigs and then take what they like.)
I thought Debian Unstable was the basis for Debian Stable…
I cannot overstate how much I admire Apache Foundation. Their pool of high quality Software and professionalism is a flagship of Open Source Software. I for one am sticking with AOO, let the LO guys do the hacking 😛
I use Lotus Symphony almost daily and it is pretty good. If a successful marriage of AOO and Symphony happens with dependence on more recent eclipse/jdk I will definitely use it more.
The reasons why libreoffice even exists are reason enough to move away from OOo/AOO.
IBM dropping symphony and focusing on AOO is great but it’s already behind in a lot of ways especially in code quality.
I can’t edit my post but here’s an interesting graphic on how far LO has pulled away from AOO
http://people.gnome.org/~michael/images/2012-04-25-ooo-comparison.p…
Well, the author of that comparison, is a LO developer, and the guy didn’t run OpenOffice, he simply read the release notes.
For all I know the “features” are not very operational: just try to import a visio document if you can.
This comparison is much more interesting:
http://www.hostcult.com/2012/05/apache-openoffice-34-vs-libreoffice…