[conspire] (forw) Re: [Sclug] Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Goodbye to Open Office (maybe?)

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> More about this matter in context, including more about the licensing
> split, here:
> http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Goodbye-to-Open-Office-maybe-td4192506.html

Also, some historical background in case anyone still doesn't know.
(Linux people generally have no problem with this, but the many legacy
MacOS and Windows users of OpenOffice[.org] generally have _no_ clue.)

> ----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2016 14:55:44 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: skeptic at lists.johnshopkins.edu
Subject: Re: [Bulk] Happy 25th Birthday, Linux

Quoting Terry W. Colvin (fortean1 at mindspring.com):

> I downloaded LibreOffice today as Open Office programs
> would not open, something about elevated something or other.
> I notice that LibreOffice opens a presentation in the slide
> show mode.

OpenOffice (formerly OpenOffice.org, formerly StarOffice) long ago
became problematic -- right around the turn of the decade, in fact.

It originated as proprietary office suite StarOffice from German firm
Star Division GmbH, which was bought out by Sun Microsystems in 1999.
Before Sun got gobbled up by Oracle Corporation, Sun decided to create a
completely open source variant of StarOffice.  This was
'OpenOffice.org' aka OO.o, commonly called 'OpenOffice' unofficially
(but not officially because of a trademark collision), released in 2000.

OO.o perked along for years in parallel to Sun marketing Sun StarOffice
as a corporate-supported variant -- running into problems only after
Oracle engulfed Sun Microsystems in 2010.  Problem is, nobody trusts
Oracle, which has a piratical reputation, and there were a lot of
concerns both real and paranoid about the project's management.  So, a
large group of developers left and created dominant code fork
'LibreOffice' in January 2011, under a new umbrella group called The
Document Foundation (TDF).

TDF tried to maintain cordial relations only to be unceremoniously
kicked by Oracle off the OpenOffice Community Council.  Oracle
essentially ceased developing OO.o in April 2011 and fired the remaining
developers.  TDF asked them nicely to get the now-unused trademark (and
thus naming) rights, and was ignored.  In June 2011, Oracle instead
reassigned the trademark rights to Apache Software Foundation (ASF),
developers of the Apache Web server software and some other popular
codebases.  OO.o was thus renamed to Apache OpenOffice starting in May
2012.

That's where the second problem with OpenOffice arose:  ASF lacks an
adequate core of interested developers, so Apache OO _seriously_ sucks
compared to LibreOffice, e.g., it continues to have major unfixed
security bugs.

Of course, outside the organised open source community, most naive users
are completely unaware of any of the above, and most have heard of
'OpenOffice' but never of LibreOffice -- and thus seldom seek out the
vastly better and in fact dominant successor project.




Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2016 15:13:08 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: skeptic at lists.johnshopkins.edu
Subject: Re: [Bulk] Happy 25th Birthday, Linux

Quoting Beth W (badastrum at gmail.com):

> That's the rub: they don't want to pay for it.

And they'd like a pony, I'm sure.  ;->

> They're looking to get what they want for free. So after I install
> Office Libre, configure it, and explain it to them, they whine,
> "Ohhhhhh....but Beth, I know you get all kinds of free copies of
> Microsoft Office from the U for your own computers, so -- couldn't you
> just stick one of your free copies on mine?"
>
> No.  Just NO. And don't ask me again.

Good for you.

One of the dirty little secrets of proprietary software firms is the
degree to which many of them rip each _other_ off.  Two of the three
times in my life I've ended up working for proprietary software firms, I
have never _seen_ so much bootlegging.  (The third was Cadence Design
Systems, a huge EDA-software firm, which eschewed such criminality
because, well, they run a clean shop.)

I was disappointed but not very surprised after my 1990s-2000s employer
VA Linux Systems, a hardware firm, exited that industry and became VA
Software Corporation, a proprietary software firm, to be ordered by my
little passive-aggressive shit of a boss to install MS-Office 2000 onto
workstations using the same product activation key already recently put
in use several places elsewhere in the firm.  I politely pushed back
that I'll be glad to comply the moment she gave me either a fresh
activation key or evidence of a site licence.  (To my knowledge, after
the change of industry segment, exactly _one_ MS-Office grey market copy
got installed everywhere.)  I'm sure this is one of the reasons I was
pushed out the door about a year later, but at least I joined the ranks
of the unemployed as a non-thief.

> Hell, I won't install that Office365 crap on any of my machines,
> even though it is free.

Yeah, I read about that, and, wow, _scare me_!  Sorry, you expect me to
pay for access to my data on a subscription basis?  Using only hosted
Internet-based ('cloud') software under someone else's control that is
subject to withdrawal at someone else's whim?

Wow, we thought proprietary software was a bad deal, but this doubles
down on that by ensuring that you don't even have _binaries_ of the
software, and rent the ability to run Internet-based software on a
subscription basis.  Want to be able to continue to read your own files?
You have to keep ponying up.




Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 00:40:24 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: skeptic at lists.johnshopkins.edu
Subject: Re: [Bulk] Happy 25th Birthday, Linux

Quoting Terry W. Colvin (fortean1 at mindspring.com):

> Thank you and AP-preciate the history re OpenOffice, Apache,
> and LibreOffice.  I've passed this to several friends.  When
> viewing a presentation I can right click and 'Edit Presentation'
> to see the individual images.

You are more than welcome.  I'm worried about friends still using
OpenOffice[.org], because it's so _very_ poorly maintained that it's
actively dangerous to users, and also LibreOffice is starting to leave
it in the dust in other ways, too.

It's _still_ a ridiculous memory hog and squats on a stupendous amount
of disk space (by _my_ standards -- ~1.5GB), which is in part (no doubt)
a consequence of it being an all-singing, all-dancing 'suite' that is
simultaneously a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program,
presentation grapics package, and database front-end app.  On Linux,
there are also other, much faster, much smaller graphical word
processors, spreadsheets, etc. that you can run a la carte instead of
OO.o / LibreOffice -- e.g., the AbiWord word procesor and the gnumeric
spreadsheet.

I see there are ports of AbiWord to MS-Windows, but have no
idea how good it is, and it's a pretty old version.
http://www.abisource.com/  Point of comparison:  A recent release of
AbiWord took up about 73 MB of disk space, plus 3.1MB for optional docs. 
(It also depends on some external dynamic libraries that take up some
modest amount of extra space, beyond that.)

Gnumeric hasn't had MS-Windows binaries for quite a while, FWIW, which
is a pity.


> ----- End forwarded message -----