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Welcome LibreOffice! A time to move on



For some time I have truly been a bit out of touch with developments in Open Source software.

To me, the flagship Open and Free application was OpenOffice. There are of course, mightier and more beautiful ones like MySQL. But this one is closer to one's finger tips, purring on our Laptops and Desktops. Quite unlike others enthroned on the arrogant servers or known only to developers.

OOo (OpenOffice.org) was for me a good enough substitute for MS Office. It was steadily improving. But sadly, our worst fears – of commercial greed choking this great effort – seemed to have come true.

As many are aware, Oracle, the database major, acquired Sun Microsystems some time back. Sun had developed Java. Sun had placed the licensing of its Java implementation under the GNU General Public License in 2006. Java had, by then, already become the hot favourite on the web and on all sorts of devices – from big computers to cell phones.

Hmm, Yes! I do mean – Java everywhere! It was too true. Java had become so ubiquitous and almost indispensable.

Sun had thrown its weight behind OpenOffice platform. That had really helped the rapid development of OpenOffice. Besides, there are many parts/ components/ etc. that depend heavily on Java.

The takeover of Sun by Oracle had made everyone behind OpenOffice very, very uneasy. To many, the future of OpenOffice seemed very uncertain under Oracle. And, Oracle didn't spell out their intentions too well either.

The fears soon proved to be true as OOo development by the community slowed down. Soon Oracle made known its plans to take commercial advantage of the application. Not a whole hearted one. But, it was ominous.

Of course, it is doubtful whether OOo can succeed as a commercial rival to MS Office. To many insiders and the OpenOffice community this seemed more of a ploy to gradually choke the product.

OOo had become what it is largely through the voluntary efforts of the open source developer community. With and without Sun, much of the OpenOffice code came from the collaboration across the world.

Not unsurprisingly, a core team from OpenOffice belonging to Oracle finally forked away on 28th Sept 2010 to start LibreOffice.

There was much to talk about. But, Oracle maintained cryptic silence. There wasn't even a whisper about this on the official OpenOffice site.

People like me haven't been keeping in touch with all this. That is why I was both amused and surprised to find the new kid on the block called LibreOffice. None of my friends who use OOo also hadn't alerted me.

But, this kid is already matured a lot more than its older cousin – OpenOffice. And, is growing very fast! The older cousin OpenOffice, in the mean time, had been put into a new incubator to grow up! More on that in the links given later in this note.

I realized how much the world had changed. There has literally been an exodus of developers from OpenOffice.

The community effort of OpenOffice (i.e., LibreOffice) will henceforth be under the Document Foundation. What is that? This what they say:

It is an independent self-governing meritocratic Foundation, currently in the process of being established by leading members of the OpenOffice.org Community.

LibreOffice is the power-packed free, libre and open source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and GNU/Linux, that gives six feature-rich applications for all the common document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base.

Some time back, when I tried to access OpenOffice site, I encountered difficulties. That strangely persisted for a couple of days. I am not sure if that had anything at all to do with these developments.

But, soon after that I found this announcement on the OpenOffice home page:

On June 1, 2011, Oracle announced that it was donating OpenOffice.org's code to The Apache Software Foundation's Incubator. A preliminary OpenOffice.org incubator http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/ site has been established as of June 13, 2011 for the transition.

Apache OpenOffice.org (https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/) has this very catchy headline:

Incubating
Saturday Jul 09, 2011
OOo! There’s a New Podling in the Nursery Incubator
The Apache OpenOffice.org (incubator) project was born on Monday, June 13, 2011. Delivery was complicated. The baby’s doing fine.

We aren't very sure how this old baby will look like when it is out of this incubator. Of course, I wish it well. May be, we will have some good competition too brewing in open source space for office suite applications.

The Apache License is a copyfree free software license authored by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The Apache License requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer.

It is better for the users of OpenOffice to shift to LibreOffice. It has already released LibreOffice 3.4.2. This is based on OpenOffice OOO340m1 (Build:203).

It works fine. There are some new features. Mostly incremental. Nothing dramatic; not as yet.

As is to be expected, there are some compatibility issues with some plug-ins and extensions originally developed for OpenOffice. Some of such stuff which were downloaded and installed on OpenOffice cannot be added to LibreOffice. Compatibility issues, hopefully, will be sorted out very soon.

This note was typed using the latest version of LibreOffice. The language check was done with the latest version of Language Tool (V 1.4), a Java-based extension, that works very well on both OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

Here are some of the relevant links.

http://www.libreoffice.org/ [LibreOffice - Home]
http://www.libreoffice.org/download [to Download LibreOffice]
http://www.documentfoundation.org/ [Document Foundation - Home]

And, some links to the discussions/ news:

Comments on latest move by Oracle to hand over OOo to Apache s/w Foundation


Discussion on the LibreOffice vs OOo:



Comments

paaglajhora said…
hmmm liked this... Geevan da I am Sohini... paaglajhora is my gmail profile... :)
July 13, 2013 at 1:59 AM
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