
LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off - junkbit
http://www.documentfoundation.org/
======
mayank
I never understood why I couldn't find an OO fork that trimmed all the fat,
took a "Google approach", and tried to be really good at basic word
processing. This includes elements like an uncluttered UI, responsiveness of
pagination, collaborative editing, better fonts and design templates, maybe
even web storage integration. Think college students and their needs, as a way
of feeding into the next generation. Instead, we always have something that
feels like poor man's Word.

IMO, this is one area where startup developers could have helped the desktop
software movement by developing something that served the basic needs of a
large crop of word processing users everywhere. Leave Word for the people that
need mail merge or whatever.

~~~
Hoff
Why? Because different folks tend to want different subsets with their tools.

This then leads to the existence of different tools for different folks, of
different UIs, and (particularly for gonzo-class tools such as Microsoft
Office) various attempts at progressive disclosure and adaptive UIs.

Watch how somebody else uses Office or any other complex software; the options
and knobs and paths and such can be wildly different.

If you can generalize and also isolate something specific from all the
different use models (and figure out how to make money between Google Tools
and open source tools and Office and such), then yes, you've potentially got
something. It'll probably be domain specific, though...

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sandGorgon
Is this legit ? as in, are there enough people from the original project's
lead developers in here .

I am considering donating to their development fund, so was wondering if it
was just an overly ambitious project going nowhere.

~~~
bnr
This LWN article cites several big names announcing their support:
<http://lwn.net/Articles/407383/>

RMS, DiBona from Google, Lunardi from Novell and even Mark Shuttleworth.

~~~
spydez
It's nice that Big Names are supporting it, but for it to survive, it needs
actual developers who know the codebase. I believe the actual developers are
what sandGordon was referring to.

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Seth_Kriticos
Is it just me, or are the OOo .. eh, LibreOffice sources somewhat messy? Just
checked out the build repo and the writer repo
(<http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice>), and I really have to wonder if
this kind of arrangement is workable at all.

Now I'm not an insider, so I don't know, by from my lay-man perspective I
think the first thing they need to do is clean up the repositories and project
structure before anything else is done.

~~~
viraptor
Well, it's got some organisation inside. inc/source/tool/data folders are
pretty much standard in the whole tree. Everything is very modular. What
exactly didn't you like?

On the other hand, I just found this:

    
    
        DBG_ASSERT(nTab<nTabCount,"ScPrintRangeSaver Tab zu gross");
    

Seriously?

~~~
pilif
if I had to take a guess, I'd say that this code is a relic of the old Star
Office days. Remember: Open Office has its root in Star Office which was
bought out by Sun back in the days.

Star Office was a product by a german company. While it's really bad style to
write non-english code, it's understandable that it might happen in debug code
like this and if that assertion is never hit, nobody ever sees it to correct
it.

"Tab zu gross" is German for "tab too big"

------
dflock
Good; overdue. Hopefully, this is buh-bye Sun community process crap, NIH,
etc... - hello forking off github, open commmunity gOo style development. Win
win, as far as I can see?

------
viraptor
Could someone describe what's the difference between LibreOffice approach and
GoOo approach now? Why didn't they build on GoOo, but forked again instead?

~~~
ableal
Good point. Judging from <http://www.documentfoundation.org/supporters/> ,
which apparently includes Novell and most everybody, they got their ducks in a
row.

However, not everybody seems thrilled at <http://planet.go-oo.org/> ...

P.S. more coverage over at <http://lwn.net>

~~~
ciupicri
You forgot Red Hat and Canonical, although I don't know how much they
contribute compared to Novell.

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VladRussian
i've used OO only because of its Word compatibility. The root of evil here is
why i needed the Word compatibility.

~~~
cubicle67
I use it because it runs on Linux. Also, I happen to not mind it

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bartl
Maybe I'm overlooking it, but I don't see why the link is to this page. The
name "Oracle" isn't even mentioned there.

------
mootothemax
Urgh, how depressing. So now we have yet another mediocre office suite being
developed. If the various developers could get over the various political
issues, there could be a truly kick-ass suite in action. But no - instead we
have to have the _free choice_ of several so-so suites as each team reinvents
the wheel their particular way. _sigh_

~~~
bhiggins
The political issues are serious and your sense of how to solve the problem is
distasteful.

------
mjgoins
Oracle has been invited to participate in the project.

------
jonpaul
Is it just me or are the alternatives on the web, i.e. Google Docs good
enough? I mean, if you're going to write some long papers, you'll probably
just use MS Office anyways, right? At least personally, I don't use anything
now other than Google Docs.

~~~
_delirium
I could see Google Docs replacing OpenOffice for me if it were available
offline. An online-only document service that doesn't let me sync and
edit/read offline isn't that useful to me though.

