LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later [LWN.net]

September 14, 2011

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.

It's hard to believe that it's been almost one year since The Document Foundation (TDF) came into existence. In that time, the foundation has made significant progress, Oracle has handed the OpenOffice.org keys to the Apache Foundation, and LibreOffice team has been working hard to improve the suite in the meantime.

OpenOffice.org has, itself, had a long strange trip. The suite began as a proprietary office suite called StarOffice developed and published by StarDivision. StarDivision was eventually snapped up by Sun Microsystems, which was ultimately swallowed by Oracle in 2010. After Oracle took over, little happened and it was unclear what plans (if any) the software giant had for OpenOffice.org.

Oracle's inaction, plus impatience over promises to create a vendor neutral foundation for OpenOffice.org, led to the decision to fork. Predictably, Oracle was not pleased and showed TDF members the door in October, 2010. Louis Suarez-Potts told the members "your role in the Document Foundation and LibreOffice makes your role as a representative in the OOo CC untenable and impossible", and gave them the option of disassociating themselves from TDF or resigning. Very little else happened with OpenOffice.org in the meantime until Oracle proposed OpenOffice.org to Apache as an Incubator project on June 1st.

LibreOffice developers didn't sit on their hands after announcing the intent to fork. LibreOffice was put on an aggressive time-based release plan, with two major releases a year. The first stable release (3.3.0) landed just four months after the split, with a number of new features. Development has continued at a fair clip, and the LibreOffice team continues to push out point releases on a regular basis. Meanwhile, most if not all Linux distributions have made the transition from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice without any major headaches.

LibreOffice Goals Met?

When LibreOffice launched, longtime OO.org developer Michael Meeks talked to LWN about the goals for LibreOffice. Meeks said that he wanted LibreOffice to have a "All Contributions Welcome and Valued" sign welcoming contributions, clean up LibreOffice code, and "target tackling many of the problems that have traditionally made it hard to develop with, such as the arcane and monolithic build system". In February 2011, the project started fundraising to set up TDF as a legal entity. It took only eight days to raise the €50,000 that the foundation sought to incorporate the legal entity in Germany. More than 2,000 contributors donated.

At six months, TDF member Florian Effenberger observed the milestone with a post tallying the project's accomplishments. More than 6,000 people subscribed to LibreOffice mailing lists, more than 150 new contributors checked in code for LibreOffice, and the project picked up more than 50 translators as well.

The foundation is having its first election with voting through October 10 to fill a board of seven board seats and three deputies.

How about contributions? A snapshot of contributors to LibreOffice 3.4.2 shows that about 25% came from SUSE, about 25% were brought in from OpenOffice.org (attributed to Oracle), and about 20% from Red Hat. Contributors not affiliated with one of the big vendors also account for about 25% of the contributions. According to the post, 3.4.2 received more than 23,000 commits from 300 contributors. This may not reflect all work on LibreOffice, but it does show a pattern of heavy contribution.

(Re)-Bootstrapping OpenOffice.org

While LibreOffice continues to churn out releases, the slow work of transitioning OpenOffice.org to Apache is continuing. The incubator site is up on Apache.org, and things like the mailing lists have been put in place. The project has more than 70 committers listed, and commits have started coming in as well.

However, according to the clutch status page for Apache Incubator projects the project has not added any committers since the project was established. The project also lacks an issue tracker. There are no releases for Apache OpenOffice — even a beta — though code is available in Apache's repository. This is not surprising, since much of the discussions on the list involve trying to successfully build AOO. The project blog has been relatively quiet, with only two posts. The first post in June, announces the addition of Apache OpenOffice.org to the incubator. The second on September 1st announcing a IRC-based developer eduction event for building OpenOffice.org on Linux.

The developer list for the AOO podling has been fairly active — though much of the recent conversation has been community governance problems that need to be solved with regards to moving from an established project to the Apache structure and new management.

The Future

Apache OpenOffice.org is still putting together its plans for builds and releases. The plans for the first Apache release include phasing out the old binary format for OpenOffice.org but not much in the way of new features. LibreOffice also will be doing away with the old binary StarOffice formats in the 4.0 timeframe. Assuming AOO.org does come online and start pouring out new features, they may be difficult to share with LibreOffice according to Meeks. This has been raised as an issue by Rob Weir on the AOO.org list.

The LibreOffice team recently had a hackfest in Munich. Some of the concrete features that came out of that include support for importing Visio format, a feature for editing headers and footers in Writer, and an initial Gerrit setup for code review. The project has also launched a extension and template repository for LibreOffice and compatible suites. The sites are in beta testing at the moment, put into place in cooperation with the Plone community.

In October, the first LibreOffice conference will take place in Paris. The conference will run from 12 to 15 October, and includes everything from media training for LibreOffice volunteers to a presentation about LibreOffice Online (LOOL) by Michael Meeks. Unfortunately, no details are provided regarding the plans Meeks has for the presentation. Perhaps we'll see a libre competitor to Google Docs at some point from the LibreOffice folks.

Coming in 3.5

The LibreOffice 3.5.0 release is planned for December. The work-in-progress release notes indicate some of the features that may appear in 3.5. Currently there's a plan to include two new numbering types for bullets (Persian words, and Arabic Abjad sequence) in Writer, and display non-printable characters at the end of a line if desired.

Calc may increase support to 32,000 sheets thanks to features from Markus Mohrhard, and users will be able to specify how many sheets are available in a new Calc document thanks to Albert Thuswaldner. There's also improvements to line drawing in Chart, and Kohei Yoshida has added some performance improvements for importing Excel documents.

Miklos Vajna has been improving import for RTF and DOCX formats, which should land in 3.5 as well. The proposed release notes also have a few GUI improvements, such as getting rid of the unused toolbar menus and sorting menus in a natural sort order (so Heading 10 would follow Heading 9, instead of Heading 1 in formatting as an example).

One year following the split, and LibreOffice looks like a fairly healthy and viable community. Apache OpenOffice.org may also grow into a viable project, though it's a bit too early to tell whether it has legs.

Index entries for this article
GuestArticles	Brockmeier, Joe

to post comments

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 15, 2011 8:16 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458) [Link] (6 responses)

I avoid office suites whenever possible, but my experience (limited to the versions of OpenOffice and LibreOffice in the last few Ubuntu releases) is that stability has taken a significant dip in the last year or so. On my machines as well as those of my co-workers, both Writer and Calc crashes several times per hour of use when performing simple tasks. To me, that's the biggest thing I wish they'd work on.

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 15, 2011 18:46 UTC (Thu) by JEFFREY (guest, #79095) [Link]

I agree. I've abandoned spreadsheets for databases, and word-processors for plain-text editors. My text documents use ReStructured Text, which can be typeset and published a variety of ways later.

The doc-utils package and LSB bring in all the tools for a much more portable and flexible (although at the expense of a learning curve) word processing experience.

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 15, 2011 19:01 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

I avoid office suites too, but I have to use a spreadsheet and a presentation tool sometimes. I have the opposite experience from you; I find LibreOffice calc and impress nicer than in the past and quite stable. Maybe I'm not a power-enough user to stress them.

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 15, 2011 21:25 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458) [Link] (1 responses)

I doubt that's it. I'm saving sheets from larger files as CSV files, I'm creating simple spread sheets with a few sums, graphs and table lookups, I'm editing and printing simple text documents. By no stretch of the imagination could you call me a power user.

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 18, 2011 9:19 UTC (Sun) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]

Why are you using OO/LO calc for that, when gnumeric does it so much better with much lower resource requirements?

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 22, 2011 8:34 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link] (1 responses)

My personal experience is that LO and OO have the unfortunate destiny of being capable to trigger almost every single X11 bug, particularly with the opensource intel driver.

I have 2 machines with different graphic cards and the same setup and distro and the difference in behavior is striking, with artifacts appearing on one of them from the very splash screen. And then, messed fonts in presentations, presentation animations with graphical elements appearing and disappering erratically, etc.

All this obviously does not contribute to giving LO and OO a positive fame, even if they might not be their fault.

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 22, 2011 20:03 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> My personal experience is that LO and OO have the unfortunate destiny of being capable to trigger almost every single X11 bug, particularly with the opensource intel driver.

If you're not actually editing files and just need to view them, I'd recommend checking out unoconv[1] which uses OO.o/LO to convert from the command line. If you actually use OO.o/LO in a server/client model, it can also use a remote server instead of installing the packages and all the dependencies on your machines.

[1]http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/unoconv/

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 15, 2011 18:44 UTC (Thu) by loevborg (guest, #51779) [Link] (3 responses)

Off topic, but it's nice to see that the agenda for the Munich hackfest includes pasta recipes. I wonder, however, where you can get guanciale in Munich (to make Pasta alla gricia). Really, I'd like to know.

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 15, 2011 23:51 UTC (Thu) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

you get an Italian guy to travel to your hackfest from his home country, with the right ingredient :-)

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 17, 2011 14:36 UTC (Sat) by italovignoli (subscriber, #75849) [Link]

Actually, you can replace guanciale (pork cheek) with bacon, although is not exactly the same stuff. If using bacon, you can mimic guanciale by adding some oil in the pan and broil bacon using a very low temperature, until the fat start melting (if temperature is too high, the fat burns).

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 23, 2011 14:11 UTC (Fri) by clemenstimpler (guest, #71914) [Link]

You may try your luck at the Viktualienmarkt.

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 22, 2011 16:30 UTC (Thu) by dwhytock (guest, #80401) [Link] (2 responses)

Not really thrilled with the title, considering "Apache OpenOffice.org" has only existed for a few months...Will there be another article with the same title when AOO has been around for a year?

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 22, 2011 19:29 UTC (Thu) by rcweir (guest, #48888) [Link] (1 responses)

It is even stranger than that. LO is built on 11 years of OOo work. So a more accurate headline would be: "OpenOffice 11 years later: The Apache version and the LibreOffice fork"

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

Posted Sep 23, 2011 1:26 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link]

And OpenOffice is built on Star Office....

Some Factual Errors

Posted Sep 22, 2011 17:05 UTC (Thu) by rcweir (guest, #48888) [Link] (6 responses)

I'm a committer on the Apache OOo project and wanted to bring to the reader's attention several errors in the article.

First, we do have an issue tracker for the project. It is linked to from the project's homepage under "Bug Tracking". Not a very obscure name, IMHO. But I'm open to suggestions that would make it easier to find.

You can get to it directly here: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/

Also, the article claims that the Apache project has added no committers since the project started. This is incorrect. We've added 16. This can be confirmed by looking at our monthly status reports:

http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/September2011

http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/August2011

http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/July2011

The September report, in particular, also talks about the successful migration of the OOo Bugzilla instance to Apache, as well as the transfer of the OpenOffice.org domain name and trademarks.

Regards,

-Rob

Some Factual Errors

Posted Sep 22, 2011 18:53 UTC (Thu) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] (5 responses)

Apache Incubators are tracked on the clutch page http://incubator.apache.org/clutch.html and as the article mentions that page at least doesn't know about any new committers, or that the project has a tracker.

And if you go to http://openoffice.org/bugzilla/ it says:
"This instance of Bugzilla is now Read-Only!!
I do not have a new URL for the RW Bugzilla yet!"

So it would certainly help if you fixed those project information pages.

Also you might have a different definition of committer. Although you say you added 16 committers, there seem to have been only 5 hackers who did 71 code commits if you look at the svn repository after it got imported last month. Which at least looks a bit less than LibreOffice which had 69 committers who made 1392 commits in the last 30 days.

You might want to setup something like http://cia.vc/stats/project/libreoffice to track commits per day for people wanting to easily keep track of the project code commit activity.

Some Factual Errors

Posted Sep 22, 2011 19:27 UTC (Thu) by rcweir (guest, #48888) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't rebut the your assertion that the author's erroneous claims are based on poor research. I'm just pointing out the facts, and substantiating them with evidence.

-Rob

Some Factual Errors

Posted Sep 22, 2011 20:15 UTC (Thu) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't rebut the your assertion that the author's erroneous claims are based on poor research.

That wasn't my assertion. The author showed where he did research and found his facts. Doing a little research at least gives the impression the Apache Office project hasn't really be started yet because of a lack of resources and committers to take up where openoffice.org left. Even the original draft of the September status report says that:

The current committers are not equipped to fully resource the migration of OpenOffice.org sites and services under Apache OOo incubation. Preservation of the Wiki is in doubt because of resource and support limitations. Cutover of mailing-list and registration/forwarding systems is not resourced at all. The ability to make anticipatory modifications of OpenOffice.org in preparation for staging is also limited, with volunteer support and administration of the live system possibly eroding.

The article doesn't imply nothing is being done, just that the project still has to start delivering. And it seems at least some participants agree with that assessment. It is good that you recently did setup a tracker, but that was probably done after the article was written, and as you can see it isn't easily discoverable through at least two standard pages about the project. My point simply was that you could fix those pages if you think the conclusions drawn from them is incorrect.

It is appreciated that you are still searching how to setup the project and to find the resources needed to push forward. But you could certainly try to make the facts more easily discoverable. Maybe in year a whole different article will be written, but I do believe the current facts and evidence support what the author writes about the current state of the Apache Office project.

Some Factual Errors

Posted Sep 22, 2011 21:05 UTC (Thu) by rcweir (guest, #48888) [Link]

"I do believe the current facts and evidence support what the author writes about the current state of the Apache Office project."

The issue tracker is here: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/

I invite you to click it. I assure you it is there. It has been there for weeks, announced on the Apache list on August 3oth, over two weeks before this article is posted:

http://markmail.org/message/n4ptdcj26io6npk2

If you say that you had difficulties finding this, even though it is linked to from the project's Apache home page, then I am prepared to believe you. But facts are facts. And the fact is the issue tracker is there.

Ditto for the committers since the project started. I accept the you may have been confused. But I've shown you the facts, in the official reports of the project. Facts are facts. And the fact is the article is wrong.

-Rob

Some Factual Errors

Posted Sep 22, 2011 20:09 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> if you look at the svn repository after it got imported last month.

One thing I'm wondering what the process of converting a distributed VCS repo into a centralized repo was. Were these steps published anywhere? I can't imagine that the process was lossless, but I'm interested in it nonetheless.

Some Factual Errors

Posted Sep 22, 2011 20:33 UTC (Thu) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

All history from the previous DVCS repo was thrown away when the code was imported. There were some tries to keep the history, but nothing worked: https://cwiki.apache.org/OOOUSERS/svn-import-experience.html