3 ms·

The real, non-political competitor to the OpenOffice lineage has always been Calligra[1]. It sees dramatically less development, but it is also one of the KDE r

by zanny 10y ago

The real, non-political competitor to the OpenOffice lineage has always been Calligra[1]. It sees dramatically less development, but it is also one of the KDE related projects that has a knack for using its toolkit to dramatically reduce its own code bloat - what takes hundreds of thousands of lines of reinventing the wheel in OO/LO is several hundred lines of extremely well maintained Qt data structures. Even when the zombie AOO dies it does not mean the end to competition in the free office suite space. Even beyond Calligra there are some Gnome based efforts and third party projects (including web based ones) that provide similar tools. There is no shortage of competition, and if there were ever a slowdown in LO we would just see another fork akin to the Oracle escape. https://www.calligra.org https://www.calligra.org

smellf 10y ago
> Calligra That webpage though. If I told my aunt to download Calligra she would have no idea what to do once she got there. You have to click the tiny "Get Calligra" in the upper right, then scroll down and click "For MS Windows" in the middle of a list, then read through a list to find the download that's actually Calligra, then download the right msi for your architecture. Compare that to openoffice.org, and then to libreoffice.org, and watch the page get better and better for aunts everywhere. > several hundred lines of extremely well maintained Qt data structures Sounds amazing to me, I may try it out too. But people who aren't tech literate and are looking for a free alternative to MS Office know OO.org, and that's the real crux of the issue - OO.org is effectively dead. If OO.org instead redirected to libreoffice.org with a little disclaimer, more people would be using better free software. The OO.org codebase isn't going anywhere. But Apache has a responsibility to its users and its reputation, and IMHO they should redirect the OO.org domain to LO.org, and let the community decide if the original OO.org codebase is worth resurrecting.

by zanny 10y ago

smellf 10y ago

> Calligra That webpage though. If I told my aunt to download Calligra she would have no idea what to do once she got there. You have to click the tiny "Get Calligra" in the upper right, then scroll down and click "For MS Windows" in the middle of a list, then read through a list to find the download that's actually Calligra, then download the right msi for your architecture. Compare that to openoffice.org, and then to libreoffice.org, and watch the page get better and better for aunts everywhere. > several hundred lines of extremely well maintained Qt data structures Sounds amazing to me, I may try it out too. But people who aren't tech literate and are looking for a free alternative to MS Office know OO.org, and that's the real crux of the issue - OO.org is effectively dead. If OO.org instead redirected to libreoffice.org with a little disclaimer, more people would be using better free software. The OO.org codebase isn't going anywhere. But Apache has a responsibility to its users and its reputation, and IMHO they should redirect the OO.org domain to LO.org, and let the community decide if the original OO.org codebase is worth resurrecting.