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What reasons are there to prefer OpenOffice? From my perspective, I hear about LibreOffice updates often, and OpenOffice doesn't sound like it's being maintain
by wjoe 10y ago
What reasons are there to prefer OpenOffice? From my perspective, I hear about LibreOffice updates often, and OpenOffice doesn't sound like it's being maintained as much. I don't know if this is actually correct, but I never understood what the need was for keeping them separate after Oracle gave up OO to Apache. LibreOffice seems to have 'won' popular attention if nothing else, and is the one included in distros now.
Having two forks competing just seems confusing and a waste of effort on maintaining two forks. Initially it made sense to have a fully open fork when OpenOffice was under Oracle's control, but I don't understand what the purpose the two forks serve now that OO is under Apache's control.
- mindcrime 10y agoThe two forks represent two different ideologies to a large extent - "permissive" licensing vs "copyleft". Some of us think it's important to have a full-featured, world-class office suite that's under a permissive license. Others think it's important to have a full-featured, world class office suite that's copyleft. Who's to say either is wrong? Feature wise, there may not be a lot of reasons to prefer AOO right now. I don't know, as I spend very little time looking at / using, LibreOffice. AOO does everything I need, so what differences exist aren't ones that concern me a lot. YMMV.
- wjoe 10y agoYeah, to be honest I could just use OpenOffice.org from the pre-Oracle days and it'd still do everything I need for the occasional time I care about office documents. I didn't realise it came down to licensing. Thanks for clearing that up. Perhaps both are important.
- davidgerard 10y agoSo what you're saying is, LO vs AOO is real-world testing that shows a conclusive defeat of "permissive" at the hands of "copyleft", in terms of appeal to the class of users who know the difference.
- jimjag 10y ago"users"?? Hardly. Instead, it shows that should copyleft people desire, they can severely damage permissive projects by simply not doing what their own license requires. They kind of prove the point that you have to force people to give back, because given their own tendencies, they won't. LO could have easily been a bilateral partner, instead of a simple consumer. Even so, LO benefited greatly by having AOO to consume, as I have mentioned elsewhere. You simply can't ignore that nor hand-wave away it's significance.
- int_19h 10y agoI can see how LO benefited from the original OO greatly, but AOO? Sure, LO has ported a bunch of stuff from there, but they wrote a great deal more from scratch (unsurprising, since that's where all the dev resources were). And, aside from abstract good feelings, what benefit would having two forks of the same product, with no clear difference in philosophy (like you have with the BSDs, for example), serve? Sure, the licenses are different. But if LO guys cared about more permissive licenses, they would have just dual-licensed their own codebase.
- mindcrime 10y agoGerard, take your anti-AOO trolling somewhere else. I've had enough of it.
- davidgerard 10y agoI think the problem there is that you are, literally, one of the AOO developers who spent his time commenting on blogs and forum sites, flaming people who were pointing out the Emperor's new security policy - while not lifting a finger to actually stop distributing security holes to your own users. It is possible you don't have the moral high ground here. Dab hand at flaming people, though, well done.
- mindcrime 10y agoMaybe so. At any rate, have a nice day, and a great weekend!
- CopperWing 10y agoWell, LibreOffice is not "copyleft" licensed. It is distributed under a joint of licenses: GNU Lesser GPL v3+ and Mozilla Public License v2. The latter is not "copyleft".
- mindcrime 10y agoI could be wrong, but from what I remember, the MPL has generally been considered a "weak copyleft" license.
- CopperWing 10y agoAs far as the Wikipedia definition of it goes, yes it is a "weak copyleft", but that basically means that the license on code and patents is liberal, while license on trademarks is not. That is to prevent bottom feeders to take for example Firefox and LibreOffice, rebuild them with adware and malware and redistribute new installers as "Super Firefox", "LibreOffice Improved" or other misleading trademarks.
- billforsternz 10y agoI still need OO because in the documents I work with at least, LO will not let me select certain frames. I see an awful lot of LO good OO bad comments here and elsewhere, but my user experience doesn't really conform to that pattern.
- davidgerard 10y agoNot clear what you mean. Is there a bug report you can link to? (If not, one shouldn't be hard.)
- billforsternz 10y agoWhat I mean, is that on occasions when editing .odt documents I create frames to organize for example some mono spaced text in a box. With OO if I move the mouse near the border of the box I am reliably able to click and select to grab onto the frame itself, for example to resize it. With LO this is hit and miss for me, for some reason. From my user perspective, LO is happy enough to show me the frame but refuses to let me manipulate the frame. Not always, and not for all frames, but often enough to be (very) annoying.