LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 6:09 UTC (Sun) by cornelio (guest, #117499)
In reply to: LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress by mathstuf
Parent article: LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

> Out of curiosity, what was missing in LibreOffice that Apache had in their releases?

Stability. The Apache releases kept the changes small and basically only changed whatever had to be relicensed or brought features from IBM's Symphony. You just don't change an office suite that is working for the new and latest fork, especially in the Windows world (perhaps that's why a lot of people kept using XP for a while).

> Weren't they merging the AOO code in regularly?

TBH, I don't know. The biggest change in AOO is the sidebar, but since both LO and AOO have them that doesn't make it a reason to change. What has made a difference at the end is that all Linux/BSD distributions moved to LO and that involves some level of support and is also easier for most of us too lazy to rebuild the thing.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 6:15 UTC (Sun) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (3 responses)

>> Out of curiosity, what was missing in LibreOffice that Apache had in their releases?

> Stability.

It's true that dead projects tend to be very stable. No security fix will break functionality.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 12:24 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

How long did it take them to release that security fix a year or so ago? Didn't it take them three months or so of hard work before they could even get OOo to compile so they could test it?

Sorry for the snark, but when OOo and LO split, about the only visible work at OOo was (a) the work converting (or rather auditing) the change from LGPL3 to Apache - thanks very much for that by the way - and (b) the very audible and highly noticeable sniping at LO by someone who really should have known better.

What's the saying - "technical debt will *always* come back to bite you in the bum"? And when it takes six months to fix a "you're pwned" security problem, that really is a bite in the bum!!!

Cheers,
Wol

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 15:25 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

The theory that if you don't take any patches nothing will break is defied by modern "always on" network-connected software.

To make the network safe for anybody at all, it must be dynamic, things that were unheard of become commonplace, and then mandatory, and eventually obsolete, the universe's general rule that change is obligatory because of Time's Arrow can be stalled on a small scale at great cost, but is unavoidable on the larger scale. If you don't take any patches somewhere between "unheard of" and "mandatory" your stuff breaks, if you don't take them between "mandatory" and "obsolete" your stuff either breaks or gets trapped in some weird time hole where it behaves strangely and nobody you can talk to understands why.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 17:12 UTC (Sun) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

I was probably in excess of irony, so it didn't come to my mind that I could be misunderstood. Sorry for that.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 6:28 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

OK, well you've replied and made me look foolish literally in the seconds between writing my post and hitting "submit", fair enough :)

Apache's releases are small and infrequent due to (many of us said inevitable) failure of the Apache OpenOffice project. Recently that's about 12 months between patch releases, not out of caution but because it's all they're capable of. There haven't been any feature releases (not just major ones, even minor ones, anything above fixes) of AOO since 2014.

You suggest that "a lot of people kept using XP for a while", but what was notable was that people insisted, and insist today, on running XP despite the fact that it's unsupported and essentially abandoned. And that's where Apache OpenOffice arguably is already and certainly where it's headed.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 17:28 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

While I think people should have stopped running OOo long before AOO appeared (the only really usable OO was Go-OO long before that debacle), there are good reasons why people still run XP - for example we do!

Okay, it's in a VirtualBox, but firstly I can't get 7 (or later) to work the way I want - how on earth can I mirror my entire hard-disk inside a disk image stored on said hard-disk!!! (the MS-recommended way of getting round trying to have a network-based documents or pictures or whatever directory), and I really can't face trying to teach my wife how to get round this - there really are people out there who have problems learning new things :-)

Cheers,
Wol

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 19:05 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

>(perhaps that's why a lot of people kept using XP for a while).

That situation couldn't be more different from AOO. Microsoft recently patched Windows XP to stop spread of a very nasty worm. The OS has been EOL for years, they could have used it as a stick to beat millions into upgrading, but they kept their mouth shut and fixed it at their own expense.

Meanwhile Apache OpenOffice's owners have spent the last few years tirelessly flinging turds at the competition in every public venue they could find, waving around cherry-picked download statistics to paint a picutre with themselves at the centre of the universe, while they left their actual users (probably a tiny fraction of a percent of the "millions" they keep claiming) high and dry with unfixed 0-days for *an entire year*.

Because as it turns out, between the handful of remaining project members, all of them were middle management and not a single one could figure out how their own build system works to cut a release.

That's not stability, that's a cruise website selling tickets for the Titanic.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Aug 2, 2017 20:05 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (1 responses)

"What has made a difference at the end is that all Linux/BSD distributions moved to LO and that involves some level of support and is also easier for most of us too lazy to rebuild the thing."

AFAIK, none of the Linux distributions (don't know about BSDs) have ever shipped AOO. The major distributions, IIRC, were shipping the downstream OpenOffice project from Go-OO.org, which basically became LibreOffice when Oracle bought Sun and then turned it over to the ASF.

Timing

Posted Aug 2, 2017 20:08 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

It is worth being careful about the timing here: the LibreOffice fork happened well before Apache entered the picture.