An uphill battle for LibreOffice

LibreOffice (LO) keeps chugging along, with another bug fix release on May 2. Meanwhile, Apache OpenOffice (AOO) nears its first release and is starting to plan for what comes after AOO 3.4. But a recent blog post by developer Michael Meeks highlights a special challenge faced by LO: making a name for itself.

The OpenOffice "brand" has been a successful one. Many users have heard of it as an alternative to the proprietary office suites (notably Microsoft Office) and that is where they turn when they are looking. But, as Meeks points out, there has been no OpenOffice release in 16 months or so and the features of the suite have been essentially frozen for an additional six months. Largely because of the brand, though, "users are still downloading this increasingly old and creaky release at top speed", Meeks said.

He also put together a feature comparison that, not surprising given the source, shows LO with a substantial feature lead. One would guess that AOO partisans might find things to quibble with in that chart, but it isn't grossly inaccurate by any means. Because LO didn't suffer from some of the impediments that have stood in the way of AOO progress—Oracle's disinterest, followed by the move to Apache which necessitated a lot of changes—it has surged ahead feature-wise, and quite possibly community-wise as well.

One place it hasn't made its mark, however, is in the name recognition arena. Linux users can be forgiven for wondering what the fuss is about given that most distributions switched to LO more or less immediately after it was first released. But, as we are reminded ad nauseam by the media, Linux desktop users make up a tiny fraction of the market. For good or ill, to be a successful player in the free office suite world, Windows (and, increasingly, Mac OS X) is where the battle will be won or lost.

That's not to say that LO needs to "overtake" OpenOffice in order to be successful, but its developers and backers want to see it have a significant presence. That's perfectly understandable, but it will be something of an uphill battle now that there soon will be a viable successor for the OpenOffice brand. In fact, as Meeks notes, it's already been an uphill battle even without a viable competitor.

Brand recognition is a tricky problem to overcome. As we have seen over the years, technical merits are only a limited factor in which brands come out on top and which fall by the wayside. While LO may currently have features that AOO lacks (and vice versa, but the problem is mitigated for LO to some extent by the permissive license on AOO code) that gap may shrink over time. In a year or two, it's possible that there may be two roughly equivalent free software office suites supporting the same data formats and incorporating most of the same features.

Beyond the existing feature sets, many of the differences between LO and AOO are largely invisible to users. Most users don't choose their software based on its license—perhaps unfortunately—even if they did, it's not at all clear whether copyleft or permissive would be more attractive. The code cleanups and other streamlining that LO has done makes the code easier to work with, though that is disputed by some in the AOO camp, but that kind of work doesn't really directly show itself to users. That leaves brand identity as the main distinguishing element.

Now that the vote has passed, AOO 3.4 should be officially released any time now. In addition, AOO mentor Ross Gardler thinks the project is well on its way to graduating from the Apache Incubator to become a full-fledged Apache project. Once that initial, largely procedural hurdle has been cleared, it will be interesting to see where things go.

For one thing, regular AOO updates mean that security updates can be quickly addressed with actual binary packages, rather than by releasing patches that users are expected to build for themselves. The long-awaited code drop of IBM's Symphony fork appears to be imminent as well. That should bring a whole slew of features that will be of interest to users. While some have questioned whether AOO is really a project dominated by one large company, IBM, Gardler does not believe that is the case—which bodes well for the project as a whole.

The Symphony features, as well as the "line caps" and other drawing improvements that come with AOO 3.4, are likely to be incorporated into LO as well. The real question is how much, if any, of the improvements that LO makes can be incorporated into AOO. The Apache license will allow things to flow into LO, but even the dual-licensed (LGPL/MPL) portions of LO may not be acceptable for an Apache project. But, in terms of differentiating itself, LO would do well to come up with its own new features. One "killer feature" might well be enough to start the "brand recognition" ball rolling—adding a few more might go a long way toward erasing AOO's lead.

Beyond that, though, it would seem that LO and the Document Foundation have some work cut out for them just in terms of getting the message out about what Meeks calls "the new, exciting, much more featureful, and fun suite". His post was a clear call for LO fans to assist in the effort to raise the profile of the LO brand. That too will be interesting to watch.