LibreOffice

[jcm]

First of all, hooray for free (as in speech and as in beer) software! That said, you might want to check out
LibreOffice: http://www.libreoffice.org/

I don't want to bore people with the technical details, licensing issues, and politics involved in LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice, but I think LibreOffice is now more widely used and supported. It might be a good idea to link to it as well on the main page.

[SmootRK]

Good Idea. I have OpenOffice on this particular machine, only because I have never bothered to unload OpenOffice and Reload Libre (and I am used to it when I write with this machine).... but any new installs I always load LibreOffice right away.

[Joe the Rat]

I had to switch machines a little while back, so I'm up to LibreOffice. I feel so international now!

[Solomoriah]

LibreOffice is what I use now. I've just never updated the site to reflect that.

[Dimirag]

LibreOffice is the one I use, I'm changing all my word files to .odf (and exporting to .pdf's some of them).

[Sir Bedivere]

Why's everyone switching?

[jcm]

When Oracle acquired OpenOffice the project stagnated.

[Solomoriah]

It's a bit more than that.

Even before Oracle bought Sun, OpenOffice.org was available in various "flavors." Ubuntu users got the Go-OO version automatically; it supported more import formats and other enhancements that weren't the right flavor of free to make Sun happy.

Oracle, unlike Sun, has NO IDEA how to work with a user/developer community. When they bought Sun, they didn't bother to tell ANYONE what they were going to do with the properties they got in the process. This scared a lot of people (and companies) that depended on OOo and submitted enhancements on a regular basis.

So those people, unable to get answers from Oracle, broke away. The whole program was open source, except for the name. Therefore, the fork had to have an entirely different name. Thus, LibreOffice.

The nice thing is, LibreOffice started life with the enhanced Go-OO code. It's been better practically from the start.

[jcm]

It's a bit more than that.

Even before Oracle bought Sun, OpenOffice.org was available in various "flavors." Ubuntu users got the Go-OO version automatically; it supported more import formats and other enhancements that weren't the right flavor of free to make Sun happy.

Oracle, unlike Sun, has NO IDEA how to work with a user/developer community. When they bought Sun, they didn't bother to tell ANYONE what they were going to do with the properties they got in the process. This scared a lot of people (and companies) that depended on OOo and submitted enhancements on a regular basis.

So those people, unable to get answers from Oracle, broke away. The whole program was open source, except for the name. Therefore, the fork had to have an entirely different name. Thus, LibreOffice.

The nice thing is, LibreOffice started life with the enhanced Go-OO code. It's been better practically from the start.

Couldn't have said it better. The OpenOffice project has been donated to the Apache Software Foundation. They recently released a new version.

[Solomoriah]

Ah, yes, I neglected that last part. But Oracle did it too late... the community moved on. The Apache Foundation is a slow-moving, ponderous beast these days, kind of Wikipedia-like in their way. I use some of their software, of course, but they just aren't what you'd call fast-moving. I suspect LibreOffice has the advantage, at least for now.