Over the weekend, Oracle basically announced its defeat in the competition with the community-created fork of OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle will cease all commercial development of OpenOffice, and will turn it into a purely community-based project.
When Oracle acquired Sun, they didn’t really know how to handle the already troublesome community aspect of the software suite. There were already a number of problems when Sun was handling the project, and Oracle didn’t really address any of them. A number of community members had enough, and decided to fork the project into LibreOffice, governed by the then newly-formed Document Foundation.
Just about every major corporate interest followed the fork, leaving Oracle as pretty much the only one still investing in OpenOffice.org. Oracle then proceeded to make everything worse by not accepting an invitation from The Document Foundation, and by pressuring people with leadership roles in the OpenOffice project to step down if they involved themselves with TDF.
Now, though, it would seem Oracle has realised that it fighting a losing battle. “Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis,” said Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle, “We intend to begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office. Oracle will continue to strongly support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such as the Open Document Format.”
Translation: “we thought we didn’t need that stupid community, and we thought we could do everything alone. Now, we are going to spin this as something good by claiming we’re going to hand over OpenOffice to the community, even though we technically are giving it back to the community.”
CEO: My last product was a complete and total failure.
Board: How big of a failure was it?
CEO: It was such a failure we had to open-source it.
Board: Ouch, you’re hired!
Hired or fired?
Imagine if openoffice did not have the open source licenese it did.
Do you think we’d have the libreoffice fork? Nope.
Do you think Oracle would have felt pressure to compete or give up? Nope.
It would do what it does with its closed products – sit on them, innovate when it wants to, and you sir, take it at a price or leave it.
The open source license is doing wonders for consumer choice, and putting competitive pressure back into otherwise closed monopoly abused markets.
Really? So what is the marketshare of these open source MS Office alternatives? Like 5%?
I would guess higher than desktop Linux at least…
I usually install OpenOffice/LibreOffice for all my relatives. So far that works out, except I sometimes have to respond to questions like: “How do I save my file so my friend can see it?”… but once you get over the hurdles, most average people just want something that does the basics.
The other alternatives I have are to tell them to shell out a few hundred $ for MS Office, or get them a pirated copy somewhere (which I refuse to do at this point).
My wife, kids, and I all use LibreOffice at home on Windows and/or Linux – so far it’s proven usable, even if not 100% replacement for MS Office. Google Docs is pretty useful as well for sharing stuff back and forth with my wife, etc.
Another option is to find out if they can get a discounted version through their company; I got mine this way (the ‘professional plus’ edition) for like $9 US, and a friend of mine got hers the same way.
Of course, if using MS Office is against your religion, I can understand why you wouldn’t want to, but for that price, the free alternatives are a lot less appealing
So far, most of the people I’ve helped have run into Microsoft’s “free trial” expiration/extortion scheme packaged with new computers – so they’ve been more than happy to use a good free replacement once they find out that they exist.
Most people are simply unaware of software like Firefox or OpenOffice – word-of-mouth is the most powerful marketing for these projects.
As for MS Office – I use 2007 at work, and absolutely detest the new ribbon-based layout… I’d rather go back to Office 2000/2003, but such is life when you’re forced to upgrade for business compatibility reasons.
Or in the case of IE6, when you’re forced to stick with the same version for business compatibility reasons
Best of luck with that when MS decides to arbitrarily change the file format again just to force you to upgrade.
Speaking of upgrades, here is an upcoming one that people don’t have to pay for:
http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/04/15/libreoffice-3-4-beta-…
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/3.4
The default file format is ODF 1.2, which has recently been released by the ODF Technical Committee.
http://www.pupuweb.com/blog/openoffice-org-3-4-beta-release-with-im…
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/03/odf-1-2-committee-specification…
ODF 1.2 will formailse the ODF standard that the majority of Office suites use as their default file format today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_software
Edited 2011-04-20 01:08 UTC
Okay, so 0.02%.
That number seems inflated.
Edited 2011-04-21 19:06 UTC
More like 20%, possibly much higher in certain countries. It’s nothing to sniff at and a definite threat to MS. Almost every customer I’m going to I’m installing LibreOffice, and any time someone is buying a new computer I’m advising them not to purchase MSOffice unless they are working within a business environment. I alone would be responsible for a few thousand more copies of LibreOffice out there. There is no justification for buying MS Office just to be able to play some powerpoint chain mail.
Otherwise known as spreading religious dogma.
Or perhaps known as offering great customer service. Most IT shops would prefer to sell you a copy of Office and make their cut than provide something that offers value for money. Good on him I say
More like a disservice.
I don’t trust it for compatibility with Office formats and the politics behind those formats are irrelevant when making a recommendation.
The individual that you save $100 today might one day use OpenOffice to send in a resume that looks garbled to the employer.
People still send resumes as .doc? I thought most saved them as PDF these days.
Some vote of confidence that is. Just don’t send your resume as a doc file!
I can’t even personally recommended Foxit anymore because I have seen what the 1% cases look like. Yes it is fine 99% of the time but the 1% can really ruin someone’s day.
Maybe we need more neutral formats but that is irrelevant to what I will personally endorse.
Most people in my country do.
I actually send mine as RTF which is associated with Word and works with most office formats.
Good luck with that. For two years before I was hired at my current job back in September I was sending out PDF resumes and the most common response I got back was “Can you send it to me in word?”. Somehow people prefer to use an expensive, proprietary piece of software just to read a brain dead proprietary format instead of reading an open format with various FREE readers. I just don’t get it but it’s true.
The reason for wanting .doc Cv’s is that many agencies then reformat it and wrap it in their corporate branding before sending out to companies.
I’ve seen the same CV in at least four different formats recently. The text was the same (including the mistakes (sigh)) but the ‘branding’ was very different.
One agency’s ‘stuff’ was so intrusive it turned a two page Cv into a 5 page one. Needless to say we didn’t use them. IMHO, that goes too far and is much like the Ad riddled web sites we see so commonly these days.
And that’s the probably the best reason to keep using PDF … middlemen can’t (easily) modify the resume. Yes, PDF isn’t perfectly, completely, securely read-only, but it’s pretty damned close. I like to know that what I send is actually what is received/read, and that it hasn’t been marked up by some yahoo trying to “help” me.
This is actually a sore point for me.
I’ve been recently hunting for a new IT job in the UK. Every single (bar one) agency and prospective employer has asked me to convert my PDF CV to a MS Word DOC format.
In fact some job sites only offer .DOC, .RTF and .TXT extensions for attaching / uploading a CV. I mean, who in their right mind thinks a raw ASCII text file is better than a PDF which -as the name explicitly states- is designed to be a standard way for sending formatted portable documents.
To say I was irritated by this idiotic request from IT recruiters and job sites would be putting it mildly.
Weird. I always send my cv as pdf, and nobody ever cared. I also always send my invoices as pdf, if only because it means the payer can’t mess with the contents.
I thought it was odd to, but I believe it was because the agents need to edit applicants CVs (though I could only guess why).
The worst thing is, you can copy and paste text out of PDFs and even edit unprotected ones.
I’m yet to hear a good reason for agents or employers not to accept a PDF CV. It just goes to show how firmly embedded in MS tech the UK is.
The staff only know how to use Word. There job is headhunting or other HR tasks and like most office jobs, they assume that learning to use there technology tools better falls outside the job description.
Uhm, no. You can change pdfs. If they’re readable, the’re editable.
If you don’t send as .doc I can tell you that most places will round file your resume since the HR pre screening software usually doesn’t work on PDF. Oh and I have personally seen a student lose a full 20 points on a paper (dropping them from a B to an F) for using Open Office which turned their paper into word salad on the teacher’s Office 2K3.
Whether you like it or not there is a reason why most stick with MS Office, and that is compatibility. I’m sure the FOSS guys will make some claim about Office 2K docs getting mangled in 2K10 (although frankly I have NEVER seen this, and I’ve dealt with multiMb docs with tons of formatting) but compared to the word salad that OO.o can spit out it really is like night and day.
In the end it is Linux all over. if you have time to learn it AND fiddle with it AND deal with its quirks AND don’t need to worry about getting round filed or dinged by incompatibility? The OO.o is for you. I personally give it out to home users since little Billy doing a book report is gonna print it anyway. but in business? Good way to make sure you don’t get called for that job, or get that contract signed, etc. Having your doc come out as word salad is the surest way to look Mickey Mouse in business, and appearances matter.
The fact that MS Office mangles incoming documents is an anti-feature of MS Office, not a reason to use it.
When your homewrok assignment is done, click on the “PDF” icon in the toolbar of LibreOffice and send the resulting PDF file to your teacher. If the teacher cannot read it, complain and complain until you get him/her fired, as your teacher is incompetent.
It is not MS Office that mangles incoming documents, the incoming documents have not been written properly.
In professional situations you need to have basically a 1-1 between what is seen on your screen and what is seen on your recipients screen.
This is why Office currently rules the roost for document exchange, it’s easy enough to use , and has momentum.
How would you determine that?
MS Office sometimes writes its own files “improperly”, according to that criteria, becase the next time you try to open a document its says “corrupt” and goes into “document recovery”. Different versions of MS Office write output “improperly” according to the input at other versions of MS Office. Sometimes, even the same version of MS Office on one machine will write “improperly” according to another machine trying to open the file.
If a .doc file written by OpenOffice will open up again in OpenOffice, but it is mangled if one tries to open it up in MS Office, who is to say if it is the saving in OpenOffice or the opening in MS Office which has it mangled? After all, the opening of supposedly correctly written files is often mangled by MS Office, so why isn’t it the fault of MS Office not OpenOffice?
Hmmmmm?
Remember, Microsoft spent years and years trying to make it as difficult as they possibly could for other Office suites to open MS Office files, and as a consequence they even managed to make it difficult for their own programs to open their own files. Access is the absolute master of this trick. This very characteristic is the grandaddy of all anti-features, it is probably the very origin of the concept of an anti-feature.
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+anti-feature&…
Exactly whom has mangled what?
Edited 2011-04-20 07:16 UTC
You seem to be saying that Office often mangles files, personally I have seen very few instances of this. You say “often”, how often do you seen this?
I have seen MS Office choke when trying to read a .doc file originally written on a different machine with about the same frequency as I have seen OpenOffice or LibreOffice do the same.
It doesn’t happen particularly often, but the main point is that it doesn’t happen any LESS often using MS Office.
Edited 2011-04-20 10:18 UTC
I think by “mangle” I should say that I mean visually inconsistent with regards to the source, not that the file cannot be opened.
I experienced this very often with OpenOffice, and not at all with Office.
In a busy atmosphere, it’s more profitable to just use the tool of the majority (Office) to avoid having to run into these problems. In circles where I know it is acceptable, I just use LaTeX and version management for complicated documents.
In order to get a visually “mangled” version of a document (that still loads successfully) all it takes is for the software installation on the viewing machine to be different to the software installation on the machine where the document was composed.
Different fonts installed, different version of the office suite, different components of the office suite, even something as simple as different patches installed or different registry settings.
This actually happens more often in MS Office than it does in OpenOffice. OpenOffice is often more tolerant when opening all kinds of formats. However, to mitigate this universal problem, with MS Office in particular, large corporations go to extraordinary lengths to try to ensure that all machines have the exact same software installation. In the company I work for, this is called “the standard desktop”.
If documents are routinely passed between co-workers all of whom have the same software installation, then “visually mangled when opened” documents will actually be quite rare. This is just as true if all the co-workers have OpenOffice installed as it is when all the co-workers have MS Office installed.
Edited 2011-04-20 11:05 UTC
Well, I guess our experiences just differ then, as I haven’t run into visually inconsistencies between versions of Office in my office. I have saved a 1-page document in OpenOffice to have it open as a 1.5-page document under Office (just text).
I’m not trying to say that OpenOffice is an inferior piece of software, just that its .docx export doesn’t meet my use cases.
In my experience, in the UK at least, many companies put out their job application forms in .doc format. These are generally pretty complex documents, with embedded images and text boxes/tables to split up the questions. I’ve yet to see one that opens correctly in OpenOffice; they’re often so mangled after conversion that text is lost completely, and all look unprofessional with messed up formatting.
It’s a problem when submitting any OpenOffice document to someone using MS Office. You don’t know how the OpenOffice document will turn out when they open it, you can’t be there to reformat it and fix the glitches yourself, and they’ll assume that it’s you who messed it up.
This is the reason why most of the charities I deal with buy MS Office rather than using free software. They regularly communicate with the government and other organisations using MS Office, and those communications can be very important and time sensitive. It isn’t worth losing out on tens of thousands of pounds in funding because an important application created in OpenOffice was reduced to gibberish.
For the price of MS Office, using OpenOffice often just isn’t worth the hassle.
The UK government has recently set a procurement policy that mandates “open standards”, and the UK government has defined “open standards” as meaning “royalty free”.
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20110…
MS Office is absolutely abysmal at handling the OpenDocument (ODF) open standard, and it doesn’t handle at all the recently-approved ODF 1.2 open standard for digital documents.
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/03/odf-1-2-committee-specification…
Considering that MS office won’t be at all capable to meet the UK government’s announced procurement needs, using it in the future to try to interact with the UK government soon won’t be worth the hassle.
If I were you I’d look at reversing your advice to charities.
Edited 2011-04-20 14:38 UTC
If using OpenOffice was a practical option then I’d suggest they use it and save some money, but at the moment MS Office is the only real choice.
Government recommendations don’t instantly change the file formats that are actually in use. Out of many thousands of documents received, around 90% are in MS Office formats, while 99% of the other 10% are PDFs.
Every company and organisation that I know of deals with MS Office formats only. Information from the government is sent to us in .docx and .xlsx only, and they expect to receive information back in the same formats. Out of countless documents, I’ve never seen an OpenOffice format in the real world.
That situation isn’t going to change overnight.
And I remember wordperfect and law.
Nothing changes over night. Simple point is over time things do change. It really depends on what country you are dealing with if you need to send odf or ooxml.
[qPeople still send resumes as .doc? I thought most saved them as PDF these days. [/q]
Sadly .doc still has to be used. A good majority of employers, even in the IT industry, demand the resume in .doc format. If sent in as a pdf, it will be ignored since they specifically require .doc.
Incompetence on the part of IT industry then? Sigh!
Is America already really this much in decline?
Incompetence on the part of IT industry then? Sigh!
Is America already really this much in decline? [/q]
As is the UK, where .doc format is required as well for CVs and resumes as a majority rule.
Not only do I send PDF files as my resume’s, I have been able to print out Word documents in DOCX format on a Windows machine without Microsoft Office installed on it. Microsoft supplies a Word Viewer program for free that can be upgraded to support all Word formats. It, like PowerPoint Viewer, is sufficient for my office needs in conjunction with LibreOffice and OO.o.
I only wish more Microsoft Office users would download the free plugin to load and save ISO standard OpenDocument file formats instead of the only partially disclosed OOXML file formats. One thing that always has gotten my goat about Microsoft is the way they scuttle industry standards with proprietary products that deliver only equivalent results. OpenGL and DirectX suffer the same problem. I’m happy with both my Mac and Linux machines and hope I never need to shell out the big bucks for either Microsoft Office or Windows ever again.
You’re not telling me anything new and you probably assume I like MS Office as much as you like OpenOffice.
In reality I don’t like any modern office suite. They all annoy me.
The issue is that I couldn’t recommended OpenOffice to a student knowing full well he might one day run into the 1% problem, regardless of whether I tell him to send resumes in PDF and also follow instructions x y and z. People can be told instructions and then later ignore them.
Promoting alternatives on the internet is fine and good but I’m not going to put my name on them in real life. I’ve done that before and got burned. OpenOffice does not guarantee 100% compatibility with DOC or DOCX. I came across a OO forum before where an OpenOffice user was told by an admin to buy MS Office after his paper was scrambled. You want to do personal advocacy, that’s fine. I’m just explaining my position which is based on real world experience.
If you use the “file open” command in LibreOffice, and pull down the list of supported formats, you can count one hundred and fifteen different file formats supported.
MS Office can’t open more than 10% of those, let alone guarantee 100% compatibility. Legacy versions of MS Office also does not guarantee 100% compatibility with DOC or DOCX.
If you were serious and truthful with your recommendations, you would tell people that they are far more likely to have success opening a variety of files with LibreOffice than with Microsoft Office.
MS Office does not support any approved standard format (including ODF, which it makes an utter mess of). docx is NOT the approved OOXML standard.
Edited 2011-04-19 03:00 UTC
What planet do you live on? I think I’ve had someone send me an ODF file once and it was years ago.
Like it or not but DOC/DOCX are the common formats of the world.
Anyone who receives an ODF file can still install OpenOffice. I realize that isn’t the “stick it to MS” solution but it guarantees 100% compatibility with both formats.
I only give a recommendation when asked and it is based on the user’s needs.
That is because when a LibreOffice/OpenOffice user first sends a file to a MS Office user, then disenfranchised functionality-poor MS Office user cannot open it, and they complain bitterly. The LibreOffice/OpenOffice user finds out about saving as other formats, so they save it as a .doc file and subsequently the functionality-poor MS Office user shuts up.
Poor little dears. Fortunately the power of the LibreOffice/OpenOffice suite saves the MS Office users from missing out, otherwise they would be stranded on their platform.
If they send their resume with the latest version of MS Office and the potential employer is still on an older version, the document format with be garbled anyway. Using MS Office is nowhere near a 100% guarantee for compatibility (which goes to show the sorry state of current office suites, even without going out of a single vendor products).
The only sensible advice is sending the resume as PDF (which at least LibreOffice can export to out of the box).
Agreed, Office suites are annoying, I gave them up about five years ago (and yes, I do work in an office, I just use antiword or xl2html to view other people’s documents, except in extreme cases when I use a Windows VM).
I used MS Office for maybe 5 or 6 years, then Open Office for a few, then switched totally to text for myself and LaTeX if I needed to send a document out. I wrote humanities papers, a thesis, and a dissertation in LaTeX and they came out looking better than anything I’d ever produced in any office suite. My CV is also in LaTeX and looks great. May not be for everyone but there are alternatives, it’s not only OO vs MS.
It’s still very popular in the publishing industry due to providing the best document rendering from what I hear.
Latex is fine but you can’t expect the general public to adopt that, the learning curve is just too high. I love it, I use it for almost everything I do except things that require heave page composition since it falls quite outside latex job description. Hell, since I found out about TikZ I hardly launch up Visio anymore, and most of my presentations are done in latex too
I’m a scientist and everyone I know (almost) is using latex, and people that stick to word see the light very quickly because word’s math rendering and workflow is still light years behind latex. When you get the hang of it, writing equations in latex is very fast, and you can copy/change your equations easily. Referencing is easy too. But it’s really targeted at specific needs, namely scientific articles and book production, not the general population. I wouldn’t even recommend doing something that doesn’t require maths or referencing in latex, because the latest versions of Word are fine.
In the end, if you leave out the philosophical choices aside, Word is still better than OOo for me. I don’t like using Word or Powerpoint, but each time I use OOo I get frustrated very fast for many reasons. It’s a good thing that I hardly ever need something other than latex.
Edited 2011-04-20 07:06 UTC
And neither does Microsoft Office.
In fact, there are cases where OpenOffice will properly format an older Microsoft Word document when the current version of Microsoft Office will format that same document incorrectly.
Your entire argument in favor of Microsoft Office is FUD-based — Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. “What if you send a resume to someone and it looks garbled?” Oh no! Someone might have to ask me to resend it in a different format, like PDF or RTF. They can reply to my e-mail with something like “Dear Moron Who Sends Resumes As Proprietary Word Processor Files…”
I am a Windows and Mac user who owns copies of Microsoft Office for the both platforms. It is no longer installed on my systems. I use NeoOffice on the Macs and LibreOffice and OpenOffice on the PCs. My work, and my computers, are too important to entrust to Microsoft’s undocumented product activation schemes.
I just reinstalled Office, compelte uninstall, reboot and reinstall. This is the second time this week. It seems MS Office on my VP’s workstation randomly decides it doesn’t read it’s own Powepoint files. The files are fine when opened on another machine.
So, a 1% issue with Open Office is a problem but a 1% issue with MS Office is all good then I guess.
(edit): another fun one
Open Office likes to specify the tab name even when it’s a cell formula on the local worksheet. This makes sense, an absolute path can point to a cell in the curent sheet or any of the other sheets (tabs).
Excel can’t handle this. If a cell formula speicfies a sheet name, it must be a different sheet than teh current one. Why can’t Excel manage this very simple thing? Why must I then edit the cell formulas back to relative paths just so Excel can can calulate the resulting cell value? If MS Office is the best everzez; why can’t it deal with absolute paths in addition to relative paths in cell formulas pointing back to the there own worksheet?
Edited 2011-04-19 19:41 UTC
It is a de jure standard … which in the real world doesn’t mean a lot. De facto standards are the ones that count.
I use a universal format… It’s called printing it on a piece of paper. I rarely have problems with that.
Save $100 with this office software. Just don’t use it to send any important doc or docx files. Some doc or docx files you receive might not be processed correctly. It will work 99% of the time though.
Sorry but that is not something I am going to personally endorse. People hold onto Office for at least 3 years which breaks down to $33 a year for 100% compatibility with the most common formats and a nicer interface.
I put people on Chrome since it can be trusted as an alternative to IE but OO can not be trusted with MS Office compatibility.
I regularly test open source alternatives, you’re wasting your time trying to give me helpful tips on switching. I always have OO and MS Office installed. I try the major Linux distros every year.
What OO needs is funding, not personal advocacy. A 20 million investment into OO would really shake things up.
“100% compatibility”
LOL. Microsoft can’t even get their own compatibility right. You are smoking something if you think different office versions are flawless in their file format support.
At best, I get about 80% compatibility across MS Office versions. Mostly problems with margins and images. I’ll take the 99% (although to me it’s 100%) of OpenOffice any day.
It’s still miles better than whatever OOo hacks together. Anyone with a serious interest in the business or education world can’t use OOo. Everybody expects everything to be in .doc, and while that is not ideal, you can’t change that. I always find it disingenuous to NOT mention this SPECIFICALLY to those you’re advocating Linux or OOo to.
And, if you’re getting into more specific publishing and scientific worlds, there’s no place for either Office or OOo. You’ll see more advanced tools like LATEX and such.
On top of that – OOo is simply very bad software. It is NOT a good product. Even as a free product, it still sucks. You can, of course, not like the ribbon, but you have to be willing to put up with a lot of crap to switch to OOo for that.
For one, OOo is not a bad product. The question is not IF certain functionality from MSoffice is available but WHERE it is.
The average user can work with both, there is enough functionality in both, one just has to learn where to find it, in both.
Professional publishing is something different. Latex is one possibility, but my guess ist that Adobe Pagemaker is used more often. If you want to use a FOSS programm then Scribus is a possibility.
By mixing up OOo, MSoffice, Latex and Linux you show a lack of understanding of the publishing business.
Businesses upgrade slowly which means most of these compatibility problems are iron out during upgrade period … depends ultimately on the system admin. Ours are pretty good as a rule.
I was running Word 2000 until last week.
Edited 2011-04-19 09:36 UTC
Ack! So you are saying that if you come to a reasonable decision based upon a rational fact based cost-benefit analysis, and share the results of your findings to other people that makes it a religious dogma?
That makes as much sense as saying that global warming, evolution, or atheism are religions. Too often people use that word “Religious” to mean “a strongly held belief I strongly disprove of that is shared with other people”.
If you _believe_ that OO.o or Libre will work for you or others enough of a percent to be sufficient, that is religious in a sense. I take the stand that using MS products on MS file formats is supported and works in a factual sense.
Edited 2011-04-21 19:05 UTC
Uhm? What reality do you come from?
I say to my customers: I can install LibreOffice here, right now, for free and it has “Word”, “Excel” and “Powerpoint” (does it have Powerpoint is a common question), or you can go to the shop and pay £100 for MSOffice. There is no religion in it. This is just a sane choice.
And if you have anything more complicated than a basic document it will fall over.
This is true… I had OOo installed once, I really wanted to use it, then I tried to open a powerpoint file from work… I had only just started it, there was one page of text and a red box behind part of the text… OOo couldn’t even render this basic “presentation” I installed office again and finished my pres in that, my boss couldn’t give a 5h!t about MS being evil or the cost of office, he just wants me to make a presentation the next day to clients. Can’t stand in front of clients who have a contract for .5 million and say “Well it looked ok in Open Office dot org at home last night”, that isn’t going to look to good. And I’m pretty sure they share my boss’ views on MS and MS office.
OOo/libre office/symphony are fine for Nerds who either only have friends who are nerds (in which case they already use a free office suite) or are self employed and hardly ever have to send more that an invoice or 1 paragraph letter to people. In the real world 100% compatability is required, these free office suits will never have real market share until that happens.
Edited 2011-04-19 11:08 UTC
There’s no such thing as 100% compatibility in office suites. MS Office and .doc are the de facto standards, yet documents format gets all garbled when opening the docs on different Office versions.
Same for powerpoint presentations.
It’d surely suck to make an awesome, flashy presentation in MS Office 2010 just to find it looks like crap when you have to show it to your customers on MS Office 2003.
“Trust me, it would look great on Office 2010… at least it did yesterday”.
BTW it’s kinda ironic that someone posting in a tech forum dares to call other people “nerds”.
Are you HONESTLY trying to say you’d have MORE risk of incompatibility with MS Office? Really? Because I’d like some of what you are smoking! I’ve been using MS Office since Office 95, sharing with those in different versions INCLUDING three years I had to share with a buddy on Mac. you know how many compatibility problems I ran into? NONE. Zero zilch zipo nada.
The closest thing I had to a compatibility problem was when I finally retired my beloved Office 2K and went 2K7, then all I had to do was remember to keep the FREE compatibility pack on my flash, or alternatively save in the lower format by default. That’s it. Now compare that to the FIRST WEEK testing the latest OO.o when it turned anything more complicated than basic header and footers into a mess. if it is an old 95-2K doc it’ll turn out okay most of the time. 2K3 and above? Word salad more times than not.
I’m sorry, but for home users? OO.o is fine. For those that are in business, or are sending resumes and papers to those with MS office? I hope you don’t need that job, because OO.o is the surest way to get your paper canned. And the one that said “print” your resume? Sorry but the HR Prescreening software doesn’t do OCR, so you would be round filed. Hope you didn’t really want that job!
Are you HONESTLY quoting the right post? Because I didn’t say such thing.
MS Office just doesn’t have a 100% compatibility rate with it’s own doc format across versions, that was my whole point.
Edited 2011-04-20 07:49 UTC
I have never seen any compatability problems with office. At work we save in the old format to keep compatability (although we use the new 2007 office), and that is waht I save at at home when I want to send anyone the files.
You can’t count on everyone using doc instead of docx unless all your documents are strictly internal (and even then).
Some time ago I got a powerpoint from my PM for a bit of proofreading. At that time we were using Office 2003 in my company and the presentation looked like a fubar mess. I can’t tell for sure as I didn’t bother with it but I’d guess it was in a newer document format.
Fortunately my job doesn’t involve messing with office suites that often.
Without a specific version, your statement is pretty empty. Safari was pretty worthless to browse the internet as well at one point. It got better, and so has Open office. A lot of open source projects are like that, all ways improving. If the feature you need doesn’t work today, check back in a year it might be fixed.
>I have no idea what version it was, it was about 6 months ago if that helps.
My boss won’t wait a year for OOo to be able to show a one page presentation with a red box behind the text correctly.
Also clients with contracts won’t either, some of the contracts are hugh… looks a bit odd when a client is paying a million for something to then say don’t send us .doc files. Use OOo instead it’s free and not evil. Or that we can’t afford the license for Word, it’s doesn’t inspire much confidence. At home I have office 2007 too so that I can work from home. I have OOo as well but just to write TYPO3 extension manuals, otherwise I don’t use it.
Ok, It seems like you took great pains to avoid the point of my post. You must re-evaluate solutions on a continuous basis to determine which is the best for you at that time. I’m sure your company at one time may have used butcher paper for presentations, along with printed presentation material. But at some point some one looked into using powerpoint and voila discovered that its benefits outweighed its costs.
You use the best solution now, and continuously re-evaluate.
Form my other posting in this thread we were forced to use Openoffice/star office 1.0 and hated it. Eighth years later at a different company, I chose to use it. Cause, its much better now.
Most people only need basic documents.
And when that person that usually only uses the basics gets sent something more complicated they will see a garbled mess ….
About two years ago it was measured at between 10% and 22% depending on which country. It has been rising at about 1% per year, so at least in some places it would have 25% of the market by now, in other places still only about 10%.
I think those numbers are from a Steam survey, which would mean mostly home users. It’s probably a lot lower if you include businesses, but that still adds up to a lot of people.
http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/news/2010/02/05/international-ope…
“The numbers were collected using a novel methodology: Over two hundred thousand international visitors where analysed by the web statistics service FlashCounter. By checking (using Javascript) which fonts where installed on the system, we could identify the installed Office suites. ”
Apparently the installation rate on business machines was about the same as that on personal (home users) machines.
Wasn’t IEs market share something like 90% at one point?
The more reasonable price for a Windows license; your welcome. That was only because of competition from open source alternatives. Consumer wins thanks to healthy market competition.
The improved hardware management and security of Windows; your welcome again. Woudn’t have that either unless Microsoft felt pressure from competitors. Consumer wins thanks to healthy market competition.
osX; your welcome.. it only exists in it’s current form due to having an open source OS to drop Apple’s user interface on top of. Consumers win thanks to healthy market competition.. not to mention the improved consumer choice in alternative to Windows.
All those network devices available to buy; your welcome.. 99% running a BSD or Linux based OS. What whould it cost if each device vendor had to write or license there own costly OS? Consumer winning again and look at all the product choice they gained. Raid supporting NAS boxes at home for under a grand; not without that nasty and regularily disparaged “like 5%” market share maintaining OS.
In the case of Open Office, the license did exactly what it’s supposed to do.
Sun wouldn’t accept code contributions from third parties (I think without attributing ownership to sun) so third parties forked it it; believe that’s Star Office.
Oracle made community involvement nearly impossible so the community did the same and forked it into Libre Office. User data isn’t lost, the development goes on and the people who didn’t want anyone playing in there sandbox get to play alone.
Again, the consumer now has an alternative to MS Office which may actually excelerate it’s development thanks to better management through the community (no single gate keeper pushing away qualitifed third party developers for profit motivated reasons).
In the end, it’s not all about retail market share percentages anyhow. Those become meaningless the moment you include something legally available outside of measurable retail supply channels.
Really?
what.. did someone not like the points given or did someone actually have a supporting reason for the down vote?
Not that I can really take a down vote seriously when made by someone without the stones to justify there differing opinion.
The government organization I work for uses Microsoft Office because that’s what they know. However, in a rare instance of enlightenment our IT staff has started recommending OpenOffice to employees who inquire about a “cheap version” of Office for home use.
I’ve also read of many governments and non-profit/NGOs that use OpenOffice (and probably LibreOffice more recently) all over the world. I personally recommend it to anyone who asks me what to do when their 60-day MS Office trial on their new computer ends. I have yet to hear a complaint about how “different” it is. In fact, I’d say the vast majority of regular users’ productivity needs can be met by the Free office suites.
I couldn’t care less about market share as long as my friends and family members have a good Microsoft Office alternative.
I’ll start by saying I’m a Linux user (both and home and at work) and I’m biased.
However, a number of my friends and family members didn’t really “connect” (and I’m being very polite) to Office 2KX’s ribbon interface, which I used, in turn, as an OpenOffice selling point, and thus far, they seem quite happy about OO. (I recently switched all of them to LO).
Having Oracle step down and let the community take control over OO (in the long term, maybe let OD foundation merge it with LO) will only make the alternative even more promising.
– Gilboa
That kind of depends. If you mean marketshare as in sales (which is usually how software numbers are measured) then there’s no real way to measure FOSS in that regard. For example where I work we have 250 installs of OOo running on Windows but there’s no sales receipt and nowhere is that recorded other than here.
A more preferable way (and I think what you are referring to) is to measure installations but that is even harder to do. Having said that given anecdotal evidence of how many Linux distro’s install it by default I’d say the install-share for OpenOffice.org is somewhat higher than 5%.
It was Sun that slapped the open source license on it after they bought Star Office.
So somehow ‘give it back’ also sounds a bit weird. 😉
(obviously a lot has changed since then)
But it is good to see they are now letting the community back in.
I guess Oracle never really wanted to be in the Office business.
I wonder if the Document Foundation / Libre Office will not get what they asked for: the OpenOffice brand/name/logo so they can be recognised by the people again.
Most of OpenOffice was written by proprietary developers when it was StarOffice.
Sun open sourced it with the hope of attracting community developers to turn it into an Office killer. That never happened. Development was almost entirely internal.
The license has nothing to do with it. Since it was an internal project they could have kept it proprietary and provided the same amount of competition. People use OpenOffice because it is free, not because they have access to the source. Freeware proprietary software can also do wonders for consumer choice. Skype is one such example.
Edited 2011-04-19 01:42 UTC
Since Sun used Solaris on all employee desktops, they needed an Office package and bought StarOffice. Secondary to company use, they tried to sell it along with server contracts trying to convert customers from MS Windows/Office desktops to Sun SuRay/StarOffice stations.
OpenOffice was created as the “demo/free” version of StarOffice as a try-and-buy attempt to attract business.
Opinions vary on the success. 🙂
With that in mind, note that Oracle desktops are Windows/Office. Not really a value add to keep OpenOffice around.
Edited 2011-04-18 21:57 UTC
Fun fact: It worked for my former company. They seemed to live by the by the ” buy a single copy of MS Office and throw it on a network share for everyone to install” model of licensing. Then the fired some lazy guy, he went straight to the BSA and the company was audited. In addition to the heavy fine, they didn’t also want to pay for legit MS Office copies, but they did want to keep records of licenses to protect themselves in the future. Solution: Star Office 1.0 for everyone!
They let us use open office, but still bought us a copy of star. It was pretty bad at that point. The same geniuses also paid for sco licenses for our linux servers. It was at that time that I figured I’d better find a smarter company….
so oracle is giving away the name openoffice then? cause I don’t really like the name Libreoffice
That’s the most important question now. Will, Oracle now that is forgone profitting on that, disband it?
Translation: “we thought we didn’t need that stupid community”
My thoughts on how Oracle thinks of the free software software community in a few words. Even if OOo became an alternate Document Foundation style project and merging becomes a possibility the name Open Office is dead to me.
Libre all the way.
Oh, Larry Ellison said it himself in almost as few:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/16766/how_oracle_sees_open_source_ma…
Didn’t work out too well for him this time it seems.
More like finally deciding to do something after sitting on it for so long. There is still a lot of open source from Sun that they are unsure of what to do with.
I’m not sure why everyone is celebrating because the best case scenario would have been for Oracle to increase funding. There is no win here, OpenOffice development was almost entirely funded by Sun.
http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008.html
The only victor is Microsoft. Oracle is making it clear that they aren’t going to be a serious contender in the office suite market.
Many governments outside the USA don’t like giving money to a large corporation that pays most of its taxes to another country. This means they go out of their way to install free alternatives.
The fact remains that the ISO is still looking for details in the OOXML formats to make other programs able to generate those files. This includes the .DOCX file format. In the meantime, OpenDocument file formats are clear enough to allow other programs such as AbiWord to generate somewhat compliant files to the standard.
Microsoft may only have a hollow victory if they lose government contracts to open-source competitors due to standards non-compliance. God knows that the USA needs more businesses and so on, but it looks like the government is getting most of the jobs at this point and it (USA) can only go downhill from here.
“Many governments outside the USA don’t like giving money to a large corporation that pays most of its taxes to another country.”
How do you think we feel in Europe ? I think 75% of IT spending in Europe goes to ‘other places’, companies like Microsoft I’m sure.
I’m trying to find the article that mentioned it. It is a crazy big number, I hope I remembered it correctly.
It’s funny, because here in the US the big story is about how all our companies have setup their headquarters in Europe (actually just a mailbox and maybe a conference room) in order to take advantage of tax havens and avoid the US corporate tax rate. Ireland was a popular location, and I think Switzerland or Austria.
Edited 2011-04-19 08:24 UTC
Ebay is the best example.
I found the article but it was in Dutch and not available publicly online, but it was 75% in the article.
Supposedly the number came from these people: http://www.hec.nl/
Have no idea how trustworthy they are.
This not taxes or anything like that, this is just sales, subscribtions and so on of software.
Taxes is a totally different story.
Edited 2011-04-19 15:18 UTC
Sun/Oracle spent money on OpenOffice only to reject most of the proposed changes to it.
Since it forked, LibreOffice has gone ahead by leaps and bounds, and it has done so without any of Oracle’s funding. First they removed all of the cruft and hidebound code so that LibreOffice now starts an runs just as speedily as MS Office does on the same hardware. They are continuing with this task, but they are also now introducing new features and improvements.
All of the new features on this page marked with an asterisk* are unique to the LibreOffice fork:
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/new-features-and-fixes/
Version 3.4 beta
http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/04/15/libreoffice-3-4-beta-…
probably has as many new faetures and improvements again.
None of it funded by Oracle.
Edited 2011-04-19 02:46 UTC
Oh BS, OpenOffice was governed by a community council that contained independent members.
Nothing stopped the open source community from creating their own fork.
OpenOffice simply didn’t attract outside developers as much as other Sun projects.
As for LibreOffice I’m not at all surprised that it is making progress. But it will need funding to directly compete with MS Office. I’m just glad that lame Java tie-in will be removed.
Sun blocked a lot of improvements to OpenOffice, and it required assignment of copyrights over to it. Oracle did the same, only worse. In the end in frustration the community did precisely what you suggested, and created their own fork, precisely to overcome these problems.
The reason is that outside developers had to assign over their copyright. In contrast LibreOffice is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPLv3) and contributers get to keep the copyrights to their contributions.
LibreOffice is getting a lot of contributions:
http://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/credits/
I think the only funding they have required is to register as a legal organisation:
http://challenge.documentfoundation.org/
“In just eight days, some 2,000 donors from all over the world contributed €50,000 for the capital stock necessary to set-up the legal entity in Germany.
Thank you very very much! You are our rockstars!
The €50,000 collected will form the Foundation’s paid-up capital, ensuring a permanent future for the organization after the legal paperwork is complete, based in Germany. The capital will be frozen assets for the Foundation: the funds cannot be spent, and we will be able to avail just the annual interest. All money donated from now on will actually bankroll our ongoing running costs for things such as marketing, hardware, infrastructure, attending trade shows, initial financing of merchandising material and, of course, developing new and exciting ideas.”
Edited 2011-04-19 04:18 UTC
True, a commitment from Oracle to work on OOo would have been better but lets be realistic; what are the chances Oracle is going to give a shit about anything that doesn’t contribute to Larry buying another fighter jet?
This is so obviously just a cheap move to win us back. Most everyone that mattered (developers, etc.) probably already moved on to LibreOffice, which was right from the start meant to give control of the program to the community to allow more community input. And it shows–its first version is already better and has more features than the OpenOffice.org equivalent.
I think now is really the time to take advantage of what The Document Foundation has laid out and not turn back to Oracle’s version. No point in wasting the work done on producing the fork (due to Oracle being dicks)… keep building on to the already-superior fork. But… that’s just my opinion.
Really, the way Oracle handled this whole situation should be a red light saying “this project needs new leaders”. Go LibreOffice.
Not so sure. I initially joined the mailing lists for TDF/LO, but soon found the founding leaders – all 3 of them – to be rather pig headed and not paying attention to the community either. So I don’t really see TDF/LO as a step in the right direction, at least yet.
Hopefully Oracle with setup a proper foundation for OpenOffice to take it over, and then LO can merge back in or remain a secondary fork of OOo and the two can track each other.
At present there are some fundamental differences in values between the two:
1. OOo does not write OOXML files. LO does. There may be legal issues there. LO founders wouldn’t listen to the community – of which well over 50% (based on the mailing lists) agreed LO shouldn’t write OOXML files.
2. OOo does not integrate Mono. LO founders seem to be pushing that direction as well. Again legal issues may be there.
TDF/LO founders seem to be more of the Novell-Microsoft agreement mindset than of the FLOSS mindset. Interestingly they are all members of Novell.
About the only real positive for TDF/LO is that they don’t require Copyright Assignment to TDF/LO to participate where OOo does. If Oracle changed that in converting to the community structure than OOo would (i) be able to accept changes from TDF/LO, and (ii) probably get most people back from TDF/LO and get the momentum behind OOo again.
So while I initially looked forward to TDF/LO, I still solidly remain in the OOo camp just because I don’t agree with some of the fundamental values that have taken hold of the TDF/LO camp due its founders insistence on doing things their way. If that ever changes then may be I’d join TDF/LO. Until then I lurk on the mailing lists to monitor the situation.
OOo is such a lame abbreviation.
No-one was ever realy happy with the OpenOffice.org name, so much so that people just started calling it OpenOffice which was a proposed change before Oracle took over.
OpenOffice was the original name. They changed it to OpenOffice.org as OpenOffice was already trademarked.
So Oracle is no longer paying for openoffice development (as I read the announcement) and all the community developers have gone to libre office, who is left to do any work on openoffice? They could just as well outright dissolve it.
I see the same discussion all the time. Linux or OpenOffice or any other FOSS-programm “has a marketshare of only x %”.
Please tell me how to measure marketshare for something free, there are no sales.
Every attempt to hang a marketshare on a FOSS program is suspicious because no one knows how many copies have been made or installed.
Linux “marketshare” varies between 1% and 12% depending who writes the article. CT in germany did a poll among it’s readers once and they said that in germany almost half the readers have OpenOffice installed, often next to MSoffice.
I am a longtime user of OpenOffice, starting with Staroffice 5.1, now I choose for LibrOffice because I think the project runs better in a foundation then with some big compagny on the top. I did miss some functionality in OpenOffice that has now been integrated in Libre office.
If you compare MSoffice to OpenOffice then you can do your work with both, they both have more functionality then most people will ever need.
To me Oracle has nothing more to offer than anyone else in the TDF now. It has been proven they are not needed (since all major commercial entities have moved on to LibreOffice). Any value they had in the OO.o brand/product is lost already. That’s what happens when things are grossly mis-managed and a fork is needed.
TDF has already moved on with another brand and a new structure. I for one commend them and wish them much future success. I know at the next distro upgrade I and many users I support will be using LO.
To me this is a clear example of another strong benefit of FLOSS: routing around incompetence. When projects are not run well, no matter what they are, a fork can set them back on course. Not something to be done lightly but it does offer a better alternative to throwing the entire package out.
Most articles I see on this topic are like this one — they blame Oracle Corp for this fiasco.
But in fact, OO developers fled Oracle and started the Document Foundation before there was any actual evidence to show how Oracle was going to treat the OO project.
The Doc Foundation people jumped the gun, based on their perceptions of Oracle Corp’s reputation, rather than actual facts.
This could have turned out very differently if Oracle Corp had been given adequate time to digest its acquisitions resulting from the Sun purchase.
Oracle Corp’s only fault was in focusing on completing the acquisition, rather than instantly rolling out complete software strategies to satisfy the FOSS community.
Oracle gave the first indications of the direction they intended to go with OpenOffice and ODF when they announced a whopping fee for the ODF plugin for MS Office:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-20002921-16.html
IMO Oracle made their strategy concerning open source software perfectly and utterly clear when Oracle sued Google.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/08/oracle-sues-google-…
Oracle sued Google over header files which aren’t protectable by copyright anyway.
Oracle sued Google even though both are members of the OIN
http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/licensees.php
and hence each has promised not to sue the other over FOSS … Oracle used the excuse that Java isn’t Linux.
Guess what, Oracle? … Dalvik isn’t Java.
What is happening now to Oracle is a clear case of karma IMO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma
Edited 2011-04-20 04:34 UTC
Actually Oracle initiated the lawsuit over patents, not copyrights (although apparently Google did change the copyright on a decompiled Java file from Sun, woops!).
The patent-quibble is over the implementation issues in the VMs, not Java itself.
Against Google’s Android, Oracle alleged issues with both copyrights AND patents.
They did this despite the fact that Dalvik does not replicate Java, nor is Dalvik functional code a copy of Java functional code, and despite the fact that both Oracle and Google are members of OIN and therefore have supposedly licensed each other for all of their relevant patents.
It says so here:
http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/pat_license.php
“Licensee grants license to other current and future licensees – All licensee patents and applications for the Linux System”
Oracle is an OIN licensee, and Google is an “other current licensee”. Android is a Linux System.
Ergo, via the agreements it made as an OIN licensee, Oracle has already licensed Google to use the patents at issue.
Edited 2011-04-20 07:28 UTC
OIN has a definition for a Linux system which is a bit brittle, unfortunately. This is likely what Oracle would argue, that Dalvik is not a Linux system, which appears to be true given the OIN’s definition.
In any case, remember this has to do with VMs not the Java language.
People defending the Office monopoly are like those who defended the IE monopoly.
Seriously? You enjoy your whizz-bang secure web-browser every day (1000x faster JS) and yet you can find nothing but vehemence when something open comes and threatens your beloved MSOffice.
I like MSOffice, I sure do, it has a whole ton more spit and polish than LO, but I can spot a rip-off from a distance and I could never tell my customers with a straight face that they are *required* to spend £100 just to type a letter on a computer that cost £300.
You are sooooooooo right. Absolutely spot on the money.
OOo was ok, more than good enough to replace MSoffice. And Libre Office is getting better fast.
Go Libre Office!!!
I really hope it gets big enough to make those monopolists having no other chance than making their products with great ODF support.
I use vim for all writing, and when I have to make something look neat or readable for others, I paste text into OpenOffice, spell-checking, putting on fonts and crap.. (I have always preferred writing with colored letters on dark screen not having to worry about fonts and margins, so vim does this perfectly..)
I use OOo version packaged for Debian 6, saving docs in ODF. Or saving to PDF when I suspect receiver being a MSmuppet. Jumping happily to LibreOffice as soon as debian does
Works great for me.
Latex looks cool though. Im definitely going to take a closer look