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Schulz: The meaning of the 4.0
Charles H. Schulz Looks
forward to the LibreOffice 4.0 release, currently planned for early
February. "On a more abstract level, these changes also mark a more
radical departure from the OpenOffice.org codebase, and it is now becoming
quite difficult to just assume that because OpenOffice.org, Apache
OpenOffice behave in one specific way LibreOffice would do just the
same. Of course the API changes do not make the whole work themselves, but
the work we started with the 3.4 branch is paying off: LibreOffice 4.0 is
becoming a different animal, and that comes with its own distinct
advantages while clearly showing our ability as a community to innovate and
move forward."
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Schulz: The meaning of the 4.0 Posted Jan 29, 2013 0:42 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] The release notes are great. Logo interpreter in the word processor FTW.
Schulz: The meaning of the 4.0 Posted Jan 29, 2013 0:48 UTC (Tue) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] Can it read email?
Schulz: The meaning of the 4.0 Posted Jan 29, 2013 10:24 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] Why stop at mail when you can configure the packet filter...?
Moving to a weaker licence Posted Jan 29, 2013 2:21 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] LibreOffice is switching to MPL2? Below is the explanation from their wiki page. I don't know enough to judge if this is a good idea. Anyone else? An unfortunate tactical reality of the Microsoft / Windows ecosystem is that 'Office' is often percived to be an omnipresent, free component of that environment. As such, ISVs build proprietary applications around those tools, which become tangled into business' processes, and appear to pay no price. At the present time we judge it is hard to replace these with a strong copy-left. Some trivial examples might be the integration of proprietary E-mail systems into our mail-merge, or perhaps linking to various databases. (They mention a choice of licences, but distributors can only be required to obey the weakest of the licences, so this is basically relicensing the codebase to MPL2.)
Moving to a weaker licence Posted Jan 29, 2013 3:24 UTC (Tue) by mlinksva (subscriber, #38268) [Link]
They're right about entanglement of many organizations with MS Office-based applications. Their judgement regarding strong copyleft being a barrier to replacing that tangle, I have no idea, would be curious to read more about it.
LO has been requiring contributions under MPL&LGPLv3+ from the beginning (or nearly so) of the project, and re-basing has been underway for a long time. The "switch" to MPL2 is long-planned and unsurprising. But ignoring all that, it would've been curious had LO instead gone GPLv3+, making for a tiny bit more of a natural licensing experiment relative to AOO (tiny bit as non-license differences probably dominate), and AOO would've been available for proprietary vendors and integrators in any case.
Yeh, maybe it's justified Posted Jan 29, 2013 4:13 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
Yeh, maybe it's justified. AOO started a race to the bottom, so LO's position is weakened by third-parties being able to get most of the LO functionality from AOO under AL2.
The LO folk do have a focus on freedom, so "beating" AOO is a worthwhile goal. Hard one to call.
I've put a note on the libreplanet wiki:
In time, that might attract insight from others.
Yeh, maybe it's justified Posted Jan 29, 2013 6:08 UTC (Tue) by mlinksva (subscriber, #38268) [Link]
"Beating" AOO is trivia, relative to beating proprietary vendors; hopefully latter is driving decisions. In any case, I'm not sure AOO really started race to bottom -- LO required MPL contributions before AOO came to light. AOO under a permissive license may have just allowed LO to do what would've taken them forever to do otherwise. Which is a little different than reacting from a weakened position. Caveat: this is from memory, I could have sequence and causality completely wrong.
That's a good page on the libreplanet wiki; made a couple edits.
Yeh, maybe it's justified Posted Jan 29, 2013 10:23 UTC (Tue) by thumperward (guest, #34368) [Link]
The "race to the bottom" was started long ago when Sun allowed third parties to license the OOo code under non-copyleft terms. The intention of licensing any new LibreOffice code under the MPL was to allow organisations who had taken that route to transition to using LibreOffice as the base for their products instead of whatever ancient revision of OOo they'd licensed from Sun (and thus bringing them back into the ecosystem). This had nothing to do with Apache.
Indeed, it is precisely because LibreOffice made such a huge concession to the likes of IBM in relicensing much more permissively that there was so such disdain for Oracle's contriving to donate the openoffice.org trademark and domain names to Apache, where they would be jealously withheld from the living codebase.
Schulz: The meaning of the 4.0 Posted Jan 29, 2013 17:50 UTC (Tue) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]
Excellent news. LibreOffice 3.x has been very solid with much better performance than previous releases. Editing large/complex documents is smooth.
I'm excited about what 4.0 and later will bring.
Base Posted Jan 29, 2013 18:56 UTC (Tue) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]
I'm excited by the rapid progress of LibreOffice ....
Except for the Base application. Every time I try to use it it seems clunky and nearly unusable. Are there any plans to put some significant resources into making it a serious competitor to Access?
Or, am I off "base"? If anyone is using it for any significant project, I'd be interested in hearing about it. My experience trying to connect it to PostgreSQL was that I got all kinds of errors which I was able to solve only because I'm already familiar with PG.
(Yes, perhaps I should step up and volunteer ... which I will think about, but I'm not sure that I really want to learn LO innards ...)
Base Posted Jan 29, 2013 20:10 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]
I tried using it for some serious work a while ago (a good while ago - not that I suspect it has changed much in the interim). I think the basic problem here is that it's just not a native app compared to the rest of the suite.
I'm pretty sure that some significant portion of it was written in Java originally, and that the original idea was something along the lines of teaming up the form side of Writer with some convenient local database and XForms support or something. It was always tremendously buggy, though.
I would be surprised if LibreOffice managed to do anything with it; if I were them, I would scrap it and start it again as a native app that fits in with the rest of the suite. This is probably a time-consuming route though (which is probably why Sun never attempted it).
Getting Access compatibility would also be hellishly hard at this point. Modern Access has a cut-down version of SQL Server inside, along with lots of other high-powered gizmos - it's actually a very powerful system - and that's before you get to all the scripting goodies.
Base Posted Jan 30, 2013 1:57 UTC (Wed) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]
Yeah I think you're right about the Java origin.
It's just a bit depressing to see release after release of OOo, AOO, and LO have long lists af sweet new features for Writer and Calc, and a minor thing or two for Base - the only part of the suite that's not pretty awesome already.
Also it seems like the other free DB front ends that once looked promising have mostly died.
I just installed Office 2013 including Access on my new laptop (got it via a Home Use license for $10 so I figured what the heck). I think I will use it to re-aquaint myself with Access (which I used some at work 15+ years ago) and do some thinking about how open source can do what it does.
I am currently deep diving into learning Qt5 well and may be interested in working with a solution that uses that toolkit.
Base Posted Jan 30, 2013 4:56 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I'm not sure how much of this kind of tool is actually used for new things in practice, it seems that most of the simple form based data entry and querying that used to be done through MS Access and related tools moved to HTTP CGIs, PHP and frameworks like Rails which pretty much do the same thing.
Base Posted Jan 30, 2013 6:10 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
So why not do what MS did and take one of the OSS Databases and stick it into base with a frontend and scripting engine tacked on? I'd imagine that there is much of this already existing in OSS and that the biggest work would be buttoning it all together in a way that leveraged the development communities already in place.
I understand we need these database "office" applications but there isn't a very good reason (IMO) not to leverage what we already have and stick a GUI front end on it that strips the command language down and adds a scripting interface. Just imagine PGL as the backend and base as a front end GUI.
Base Posted Jan 30, 2013 21:30 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
Nothing bad about Base, but I'm under the impression that Kexi is a far more mature and powerful Access-like application. Ever tried it?
Base Posted Feb 1, 2013 9:59 UTC (Fri) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
I second this. It's remarkably powerful, with integrated Python scripting, and while not compatible with MS Access you should at least be able to import the data. It seems to be able to connect to a remote Postgres but I've never tried it.
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