OpenOffice is dead. Long live LibreOffice [LWN.net]

OpenOffice is dead. Long live LibreOffice

Posted Dec 23, 2011 13:37 UTC (Fri) by erich (guest, #7127)
Parent article: The "White Label Office" release candidate

Face it: Oracle killed OpenOffice quite some time ago.

Everybody has now moved on to LibreOffice. Is there any Linux distribution who has not switched to LibreOffice?

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OpenOffice is dead. Long live LibreOffice

Posted Dec 23, 2011 16:18 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (3 responses)

> Everybody has now moved on to LibreOffice. Is there any Linux distribution who has not switched to LibreOffice?

The Linux distributions do not matter. Even before LibreOffice existed, they were already using go-oo, which was absorbed into LibreOffice as soon as it began its existence. You could even say they were already using LibreOffice before LibreOffice existed.

What matters here is the Windows and MacOS users. They are the ones who are probably still using an outdated OpenOffice.org release, not knowing they could switch to LibreOffice while they wait for AOOo (incubating) to finally do its first release.

OpenOffice is dead. Long live LibreOffice

Posted Dec 23, 2011 17:56 UTC (Fri) by lenov (guest, #15428) [Link]

I entirely agree. What you, I or Joe geeks use does not matter a bit. Personally I use mostly LaTeX, then Libre Office, then Google doc, and the occasional KWord when LO cannot open an MS document. If a new soft comes out tomorrow, that does something I need, I will just add it to my toolkit.

OpenOffice started to matter on the global scale when governmental agencies over the world started to migrate from MS Office. Such migration are huge. They involve hiring entire teams of experts (or train the existing IT support), redeveloping entire pipelines of work, and deal with the legacy documentation.

Most people have no idea how consequential where the moves of Oracle when it forced the community to move from OOo to LO, and then gave the project to Apache. This entirely shattered the little trust in FOSS people had spent a decade to instill. OpenOffice was THE successful FOSS project (Linux is not perceived as such by the public at large because it is invisible for non-geek, e.g. hidden in my parents' wifi router. And Firefox did not matter because all browsers are gratis). The entire domain of FOSS lost credibility, and the wide perception is that community-maintained projects lack maturity and robustness, and are something you must avoid at all cost.

We will suffer a long time from that mess.

OpenOffice is dead. Long live LibreOffice

Posted Dec 23, 2011 22:14 UTC (Fri) by Kluge (subscriber, #2881) [Link]

MacOS users with a clue use NeoOffice (www.neooffice.org) which I believe used to pull code from go-oo, but has lots of Mac-specific code as well.

OpenOffice is dead. Long live LibreOffice

Posted Dec 31, 2011 14:17 UTC (Sat) by erich (guest, #7127) [Link]

Well, many of the "old" OOo users are influenced heavily by us geeks. So for example my mother and my dad now have switched to LibreOffice as well (and will in turn recommend it to their friends).

OO has still quite a lot of bugs, so there is some pressure to update every now and then. And well, when my dad asked me about an OOo update, I switched him to LibreOffice.