
LibreOffice - A fresh page for OpenOffice - rabelaisian
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/LibreOffice-A-fresh-page-for-OpenOffice-1097358.html
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krschultz
FreeOffice wasn't an option?

Open Source Office?

Anything-other-than-LibreOffice?

OpenOffice is something that I can explain to my mother when I install it for
her instead of MS Office, Mom, it's just like Office but it is open source. In
fact she didn't notice for a long time.

Libre Office? She'll question that for sure, and then what am I going to do,
explain the GNU manifesto to her? Come on.

I like the use of the word Libre instead of Free among people who know what
we're talking about, but from a marketing/branding standpoint, this is
horrible.

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nihilocrat
"Libre" is probably better understood in Europe to mean "free" in its intended
"free as in speech" sense.

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krschultz
That is probably true in Europe, but it definitely fails in the US. What I
don't see is why the name has to be so damn literal.

Firefox was never named "Libre Interent Browser"

Google was never "Better Search Engine That Doesn't Totally Suck"

OpenOffice at least wasn't that clunky and got the point across.

This is a name by hackers for hackers. Why is that a good idea for a project
with the mainstream reach of Firefox? This is a cross platform office suite,
it could be used by literally EVERY PERSON WHO USES A COMPUTER, the name is
extremely important. It doesn't have to mention a damn thing about open
source, free software, or anything in its name. Most people don't care about
Firefox's development model - they just like using it. OpenOffice should be
the same way.

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sprout
Yes, and who wants to use a game console that sounds like a man's genitals or
a tablet computer that sounds like a menstruation guard. Names do not matter
when you already have a product people want and need.

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krschultz
I assume you mean the (Sony) PlayStation and the (Apple) iPad.

What sticks out to you there? If you don't see the vast difference between the
Sony or Apple brand and the Libre Office brand then you don't understand
marketing.

At this point Steve Jobs could make a toilet called the iShit and people would
not care about the name, because they know and love the Apple brand. The
product names matter extremely little for them, because people hear Apple
(some bad product name), not (some unknown company) iPad. People are excited
for the former and ridicule the later.

Sony holds an equally good name with many.

Both also have massive TV advertising budgets.

There is no comparison to this situation.

Explain why FOSS is often times better than the commercial counter point and
is by definition cheaper, but still isn't gaining traction, what is the
problem?

I contend the problem is _marketing_. FOSS developers love to redicule/ignore
marketing, advertising, and business people in general, but it is an important
part of gaining mindshare. Sure their degree is easier to get, but that
doesn't mean their job is easy to do right. Much like the bike shed, everyone
has an opinion on marketing and advertising, that doesn't mean they have a
_good_ opinion on it. Saying that Apple and Sony are in anyway relevent to the
naming of a relatively unknown product by a new group of people is like a
marketing guy saying Cobol on Cogs is just like Ruby on Rails. We'd laugh at
the marketing guy, but realize the marketing guys are laughing right back at
the devs who suck at selling FOSS. We _literally can't give away for free what
they are charging money for_.

You know where fixing that problem starts? By respecting marketing and
advertising. It is far more than "just a name". There is no such thing as
"just a name" when _your only method of spreading the word is by word of
mouth_

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calloc
Actually, I think he was referring to the Wii ...

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nervechannel
Argh, couldn't they have come up with a less clunky name??

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samstokes
The new name sucks, but so did "OpenOffice.org" (at least going by the Ubuntu
package names, they insisted on the .org being part of the name).

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pan69
At least OpenOffice was something you could pronounce.

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RyanMcGreal
The trick is to insert a glottal stop between Libre and Office.

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eru
Seems quite simple to me.

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hakl
Google is sponsoring a free competitor to one of their proprietary solutions.
I wonder why.

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bad_user
It's not direct competition ... I'm using Google's docs to keep my documents
online / and for collaborative editing.

I haven't tried any plugins yet for OpenOffice, but it would be awesome if
there was a plugin for syncing back and forth to Google Docs.

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JoachimSchipper
This article doesn't really explain why go-oo.org was not sufficient.
Nonetheless, I wish them all the best (but will continue to use LaTeX.)

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acqq
As far as I understand, behind the "LibreOffice" will be the non-profit
"Document Foundation" and that's already a lot -- the better legal position
and he companies can better relate to it or commit to support it -- companies
simply need other company-like entities.

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joeld42
Names are really important. This is a bad name.

Gimp, the image editor, is another victim of OSS naming. I know many serious
artists who won't give it a try simply because of the name. They don't take it
seriously. The fact that it's free is unimportant to them. With a better name
a decade ago, Gimp could be a serious competitor to Photoshop now, instead of
a footnote.

In this case, the developers are putting a clumsy emphasis on the price and
"freedom", which is unimportant to someone who just wants to write a letter or
make a presentation.

Read "LibreOffice" literally .. "A free alternative to MS Office". Which is
not untrue but this immediately raises the question "Can you afford the REAL
MS Office? And are you worth it?" Most people will answer, "Yes, I can and I
am certainly worth it". Starving students may answer "No, but it's less work
to pirate it than to install this weird thing."

My belief is that for an OSS office suite to dethrone MS Office, it needs a
clear focus, and one other than "free".

Brainstorming some directions they could have taken:

LessOffice - A streamlined office suite, fast and bloat-free, that never
crashes. (Of course, OpenOffice is pretty far from this in reality)

CopyDesk - A word processor for writers, not for bureaucrats.

DeFacto - An office suite that interoperates seamlessly with every other
system. It never asks what format something is in, it just works.

BloatOffice - Has every feature from every other office suite. Combined. The
most complete office suite on the planet. (A bit self-deprecating, but could
turn a perceived weakness, bloat, into a feature, completeness).

Folio - An office suite without the learning curve.

In any case, this market is long overdue to be disrupted. Google Docs isn't
going to do it. I'm a writer, and I can't even get it to do proper manuscript
format. A typewriter can do that.

Developers: If you REALLY want to help the free software movement break MS's
stranglehold on Office, don't write another office suite. Write a self-
contained, standalone library that reads and writes .doc files, that works
perfectly for the features it supports and clearly indicates to the caller
when it's going to break and what it's breaking on. Once you can write a 200
line example program that converts most docs to nearly identical .pdfs, you've
won. Not that that's easy.

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cabalamat
I'm not a big fan of some of those names:

LessOffice - people with think it does less. CopyDesk - is is a photocopier?

BloatOffice - calling something bloated is an insult. If you want to emphasize
completeness, how about PowerOffice, and use the slogan "PowerOffice -- it
does it all".

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jrockway
I don't get why people are against the name. Yeah, it's not "mom-friendly",
but neither is any software. Everyone uses Word at home because it's what they
use at work. They don't think of software packages as being discrete elements,
they think of "a computer" and "that place where I type memos". Microsoft wins
by default.

OO.org and LibreOffice should target two demographics: industries where
everyone needs to be trained anyway, and for enthusiasts. If you work for
megacorp-with-Word and you got Word for free with your computer, and you don't
enjoy using computers, then LibreOffice's advantages are minimal. No need to
cater to that demographic, because they simply don't care.

(Incidentally, I wrote a book in OO.org a few years ago. HORRIBLE. NEVER
AGAIN. But I wouldn't use Word, either.)

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e1ven
In general I'm in favor of moving things out of Oracle's control, since they
have acted as an untrustworthy partner in many places, but why not use the
existing fork?

The article dismisses Go-oo as not having enough support.. Why not give them
more, rather than splitting the community further?

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thristian
I believe one of the first actions of the new organisation was to apply all
the changes from Go-oo, so it's not like they're completely splitting...

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krakensden
Michael Meeks and other Go-oo developers are on the board, as well.

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ars
So why do they need another name and another project?

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rabelaisian
go-oo.org wasn't a fork. It is an alternative build of the upstream code that
includes missing plug-ins that were excluded from the oo.o build because the
developers hadn't assigned the copyright to Sun. The go-oo build has been the
default for most Linux distributions since whenever.

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jarin
I can understand the concerns with the dual licensing and copyright
assignment, it's the same problem I had with Diaspora's licensing.

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devmonk
Is LibreOffice the first sign of Oraclepocalypse?

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devmonk
To whomever downvoted this, you realize of course that Oracle's overly-
litigiousness:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=oracle+lawsuit>

and poor conferences for Java:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=javaone+oracle+sucked#sclient...](http://www.google.com/search?q=javaone+oracle+sucked#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=active&tbs=blg%3A1&q=oracle+javaone+sucked&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=3552031fb57c042d)

are what I'm referring to, right?

Oracle has seriously been screwing up lately. I think that the kids are taking
their ball and going home with LibreOffice, leaving Oracle behind because of
its anti-open-source attitude.

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bstrong
When I saw the headline, I has hoping for something more like the
Firefox/Mozilla or Drizzle/MySQL forks (only pull over the good parts, leave
most of the bloat behind). That would have been something to get excited
about.

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agscala
Fingers crossed on a possible vim-style input plugin/integration

