In an e-mail to their announce mailing list, the The Document Foundation have shared details of their first week of public operation: “One full week has gone by since the announcement of The Document Foundation, and we would like to share some numbers with the people who have decided to follow us since the first day.”
The e-mail, in full:
The Internet, October 6, 2010 – One full week has gone by since the
announcement of The Document Foundation, and we would like to share some
numbers with the people who have decided to follow us since the first
day.The beta of LibreOffice has been downloaded over 80.000 times. The
infrastructure has expanded dramatically from 25 to 45 working mirrors
in 25 countries (in every continent), including islands in the Pacific
Ocean. This number is close to half the mirrors achieved by
OpenOffice.org during ten years of history of the project.People have started to contribute to the code, suggesting features,
committing patches and filing bugs. In just one week, around 80 code
contributions (patches, and direct commits) have been accepted in
LibreOffice from a total of 27 volunteers, several of them newly-won,
with around 100 developers hanging out on the #libreoffice irc channel
which is buzzing with activity (around 14,000 messages sent).Turning to the wider community, 2.000 people have subscribed to the list
announce@ to keep up with the latest TDF news, and 300 people to the
discussion list discuss@, where there has been an average of 100
messages per day.To round up the numbers, there are nearly 600 people following TDF
tweets, over 150 following the identi.ca TDF account, and over 1.000
fans on Facebook. The traffic on the server has been in the region of
500 GB.In its only official response to the creation of the Foundation, Oracle
has stated: ^aEURoeOracle is investing substantial resources in
OpenOffice.org. With more than one hundred million users, we believe
OpenOffice.org is the most advanced, most feature rich open source
implementation and will strongly encourage the Open Office community to
continue to contribute through www.openoffice.org.^aEURThe Foundation understands from this that Oracle has no immediate plans
to support the Foundation, or to transfer community assets such as the
OpenOffice.org trademark. However, the Foundation hopes this position
will change as the company sees the volunteer community – an essential
component of OpenOffice’s past success – swing its support behind the
new Foundation. In the meantime, the Foundation will continue software
development under the LibreOffice brand.
As expected, a totally blank-faced reply from Oracle, communicating how little interest they have in a warm and friendly ^aEUR~community’.
Overall, a resounding success and I hope to see rapid improvement in LibreOffice over the OpenOffice.org. With these numbers, I find it hard to see community interest in OpenOffice.org continuing for much longer, especially if Oracle want to be hard-nosed about communication.
TDF, and LibreOffice, I have just one thing to say to you: fix the update mechanism. All of your improvements are completely worthless if users can’t get updates. The update mechanism of OpenOffice is so terrible, I have never seen a user using any other version than what was originally installed. 1.3, 2.1, I’ve seen them all. Don’t ship a 1.0 without an update at least as good as Firefox (download updates in background, install automatically upon next start).
Best wishes,
Kroc Camen.
(With thanks to lemur2 for the submission, even though I didn’t use your text)
I’m really glad that they have very busy IRC and mailing lists. However I’m really curious about some different numbers: like how many paid developers do they have now vs. how many did they have before? And not just coders but GUI designers, graphic artists etc.
With Novell probably being sold and IBM waiting out, RedHat will may be the only significant contributor.
The first link in the article mentions the Open Document Foundation. That foundation is no more and this foundation is simply called the Document Foundation.
Dag nammit, stupid brain. Thanks for the heads up.
I’m hoping that this project gains some momentum. I recommend OO.org to people who don’t want to spend money on MS Office.
Currently it is reasonable but there are many basic tasks that could be far more user friendly and will put users off. For example:
* Image Placement
* Image Cropping
* Text boxes
* Nice templates available by default (as in Office 2k7+)
* Easy way to make tables look nice with a few clicks (as in Office 2k7)
* Fix the default bullet points in Impress. The way they appear in relation to the text just doesn’t look good in a presentation
Maybe you could file a bug report about these ?
I’d be incredibly surprised if the developers didn’t already know about these as they’re not exactly expert-only features!
I’m hoping that OO.org UI redesign would address some of the problems (presumably LibreOffice will be looking at doing a similar thing?)
Ideally I’d contribute myself, but my coding skills are definitely not up to it and I’d imagine it’d take quite awhile to properly understand the codebase.
Those features sound like simple GUI features that would not be hard to implement. If they were known for a long time, I guess the issue would be fixed now. It would be a perfect junior job for someone new to the project.
Please, check their bugzilla before saying that the bug is already reported without proof. There’s maybe hundreds of users who want the features but don’t know about bug reporting and wishlists, don’t have the will to report it, or think that it’s already reported anyway.
There’s never too much user feedback on software, except when it’s duplicate or not precise enough
And even a duplicate bug report is better than no bug report at all.
Indeed, I’d like to see them trying some new interface design like Microsoft did with their ribbon in office 2007. Large linear toolbars with small buttons just feel extremely bloated and hard to use.
That’s not a problem, there’s other ways to contribute than code
Spreading the word about the software, beta-testing, reporting bugs, giving some money, improving translations, all that helps at its level ^^
How is copy/paste between applications? For me, the real killer in Office used to be dropping .csv into excel for analysis then copy/past resulting graphs into Powerpoint or Word as an image object. To be honest, I haven’t given application integration a fair try in recent OOo so I ask here instead.
The only thing I’ve recently run into is formula management. I open an xls in OOo and when saving, it includes the worksheet name in any updated cell formula. This goes badly when the XLS is opened in Excel again since it doesn’t like formula on the current worksheet calling the worksheet by name rather than simply indicating the cell.
Example;
Excel has cell formula “sum(E1:E50)” and displays the calculated value.
OOo rewrites it as “sum(Processing!E1:E50)” and displays the calculated value.
Excel sees “sum(Processing!E1:E50)” and refuses to calculate a value until I manually change it to “sum(E1:E50)” again.
This sucks when all I want to do is open and edit the family budget workbook with whatever OS I have handy.
Application integration works better than MS Office, IMHO. Its more straightforward and just seems to work better.
I haven’t run into OO.org changing formulas like that. I do work with colleagues that use excel. We haven’t had a problem collaborating via xls yet.
Cheers, I’ll have to have a go at moving objects between apps as the last time was probably mid way through version2; Debian Stable’s version a year ago anyhow.
I’ll see if I can figure out more details regarding the cell formula formatting. It may be something I’m doing or a setting I should have enabled.
I wouldn’t recommend OpenOffice to anyone that plans on using it for work or school.
Sorry but I don’t think it is worth risking a conversion bug. I would only recommend it where compatibility with MS Office isn’t needed.
Well, I only use Writer, but in more than 5 years of use for work I never, ever, encountered a bug while opening and saving doc documents. Not a single issue with Impress either, but I use it less often though, and less in depth (some of my friends had issues with videos in Impress, but video is a mess with multiple versions of Office and PDF too so I wouldn’t recommend it at work except when I’m sure that the file is read by the same version of the same software). Hence I suspect you of trolling on this one, except if you’re talking about another part of the OO suite (e.g. Calc).
This especially considering how much issues my teachers had with their courses’ formatting when migrating from Word 2000 to Word XP (or is it called otherwise ? The one with the horrible blue and orange toolbars…). With this and the docx madness, it looks like compatibility and format stability are not great concerns at microsoft…
Edited 2010-10-06 19:38 UTC
I have had one conversion snafu with OpenOffice a few years back. A friend wanted me to print a resume he’d done in Word 2003, OpenOffice got everything right except the margin placement. For some reason the left margin jumped to the middle of the page. Still, simple enough to fix. Now, if we compare OO.o’s MS format support to Microsoft’s ODF support, you really have to ask, exactly what is MS Office compatible with, again? A .doc from an old version screws up. A .doc from a machine without the old core fonts (so Vista and maybe 7) has major layout issues because MS’s new ones aren’t equivalent. A file made in a competing native format obviously doesn’t work well, as is plain on my own mangled resume, and it really is just plain text with some bullet points amd text formatting. No voodoo. And of course there’s the big one, OOXML loading in an old version, is that still a no go? Note that an external document converter doesn’t count. If you can’t work with and save changes to a document in it’s original format, that’s not support.
Precisely. If you want decent format support and interoperability between versions and other Office suites, MS Office is the worst choice possible.
MS Office is not even compatible with the ISO standard that it initiated.
You’re extremely lucky if you haven’t run into formatting problems. Conversion bug anxiety is a legitimate concern, and the previous poster is correct in recommending caution with OOo deployments.
The current series seems to do pretty well, but previously, I’ve checked to see what OOo documents would look like in Word and found my formatting was trashed. I can’t remember if they were odf files converted to doc files or doc files from the start, but the documents didn’t look like what they were supposed to.
Impress still needs work. It mangles PowerPoint formatting pretty badly.
You still haven’t got your head around the fact that in all liklihood it is MS Office that is doing the trashing. MS Office is abysmal at handling anything at all that doesn’t originate with the exact same version of MS Office.
If conversion bug anxiety is indeed a legitimate concern for you, then your recommendation would be OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
Not true, in many cases the problem is also documents created with MS Office and that OOo cannot open with 100% compatibility formatting wise… documents created with an older version of Office (XP/2003) that Office 2007 can open reliably and that OpenOffice cannot.
The root of the problem is that Sun let OpenOffice stagnate regarding maximum MS Office compatibility during the post Microsoft-DOJ trial period, convinced that “not being a Microsoft evil product” and that “being free” would be enough for everyone to switch to it and make the compatibility problem a non-issue. UI stagnated, Office compatibility stagnated, etc…
Not true, in many cases the problem is also documents created with MS Office and that OOo cannot open with 100% compatibility formatting wise… documents created with an older version of Office (XP/2003) that Office 2007 can open reliably and that OpenOffice cannot. [/q]
meanwhile, consider for a moment documents created with OpenOffice that MS Office has a complete dummy spit over.
There are a fair number of Office suites that can open such files with full fidelity, but MS Office makes a complete mess of it.
This is for a file format for Office suites that have 10% to 20% of the installed base.
Ergo, MS Office cannot handle the default format files as created by between 10% and 20% of installed Office suite programs.
OpenOffice has a far, far better capability than that. Only a very small percentage files (created by any Office suite at all) cause it any problem at all.
If you want decent interoperability, MS Office is by far the worst choice.
I had a long reply written out countering your points, but I really can’t be arsed to argue about this.
All I’m going to say is this: you’re living in a dream world!
When your product has 10-20% of the install base* and your competitor has the other 80-90% it is you who must be compatible – not them!
Rightly or wrongly, nobody apart from OO.o users give a damn about OO.o formats.
* I don’t believe this statistic anyway
I agree with the first point, but not the second.
Here is why I agree with the first point, but not the second: if I am using OO.o and you are using MS Office, and we are collaborating and exchanging files, then it is you who are far more likely to run into a problem than I.
Despite weirdly passionate claims to the contrary by those who apparently wish great fortunes for Microsoft, OO.o is a very capable Office suite. It entirely meets the requirements of well over 90% of Office suite users. It can easily be installed (from just one installation master) for no cost on as many machines as you own, and there will be no-one wanting to audit you for license compliance.
This is a powerful case for installing OpenOffice over the more mainstream competition.
There are a number of governments around the world who are officially adopting ODF, the native format of OpenOffice, as the data exchange format. MS Office has very significant issues in dealing with this format.
To arrive at the 10% to 20% installed base figure, the fonts installed on real-world office machines were interrogated. This method of detecting the Office suite installed was shown to be over 95% accurate. There is a fair amount of credibility to the figure. It tallies well enough with actual download counts of the installation packages.
OK, so one Office suite has good interoperability (not perfect, but good), is free, is capable and powerful enough to meet the needs of over 90% of users (probably more), and carries no risk of license non-compliance problems.
The other Office suite that you might consider carries a not-to-be-readily-dismissed purchase price, requires you to employ a license compliance manager, requires strict control over where and what is installed on your machines, has severe interoperability issues with between 10% and 20% of other Office suites (including the format that may be used by your nation’s government), and which is mid-way through a transition in file formats that is guaranteed to cause you data interchange and data archiving headaches. It does not support any long-term recognised standard format, and the “standard” format that it does support is even called “transitional” to warn you that it isn’t the final format.
I leave it up to the readers to weight the pros and cons.
Edited 2010-10-07 22:30 UTC
I’m going to try again, and make it simpler.
OpenOffice has fairly good interoperability with say 98% of installed Office suite software programs.
MS Office has severe problems with interoperability with somewhere between 10% and 20% of installed Office suite software programs.
OK, is that clear enough now?
Having said that, it is probably prudent to point out that any conversion bug is more than likely to be in Excel rather than OpenOffice.org.
For example, OOXML even specifies known Excel bugs as part of the formula space.
If you require compatibility with a formal standard, then don’t use MS Office. OpenOffice implements ISO/IEC 26300:2006 correctly AFAIK, whereas there is no software at all that implements ISO/IEC 29500 Strict.
a few months earlier and they may have snuck in under the Debian 6 package freeze.. maybe the good Deb maintainers will allow it on the exceptions list.. I’m off to check the package search
The update mechanism is the one thing I don’t understand why people haven’t bothered fixing it. I mean, isn’t it rather important for people to be able to keep up-to-date, receive bug-fixes and perhaps even security fixes easily and without having to re-install the whole thing every single time?
I have never gotten it to work myself. Either it crashes OO.o or it just complains about not being able to check for updates. Not _once_ has it worked over the years. That’s really something.
Here updates work perfectly, but is highly annoying and does not make me want to apply them anyway.
Typically works fine for me; though it usually just downloads another EXE for me to run, which then does the install/etc. It’s never been as nice as what comes out of Mozilla for Firefox or Thunderbird which “Just Works” aside from “major” updates (e.g. 2.x->3.x, 3.5->3.6)
No one using linux wants an application that updates itself. Under linux, everything should be handled by your package manager. Anything else is simply “polluting your file system”.
I know I’m being “that guy” but
80.000 = 80, not 80,000. Someone needs to learn how to use commas.
Different style used in other countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Digit_grouping
If a dot is used as a thousand separator, comma is used as the decimal point.
80.000 = 80, not 80,000. Someone needs to learn how to use commas.
To be honest, different countries have different rules on those. It’s quite understandable then to make such mistakes.
Like f.ex. here in Finland whereas an Englishman would type “80,000” we just type “80 000”, and where an Englishman would use “80.00” we use “80,00”.
As such his use of the commas and decimal points is probably entirely correct, just in a different language.
Actually in Spanish is “80.000”. In our language, the decimal “point” is actually a “,” and the thousands separator is a “.”.
Something related occurs when you americans say: “one billion”. In Spanish “one billion” is 1.000.000.000.000 (1E+12) while in English is 1E+9. Thus, it is easier to be billionaire in USA than in, say, Spain
Edited 2010-10-06 17:03 UTC
In India, we use a 3-2-2 digit grouping as compared to 3-3-3 digit grouping. So we count in lacs and crores and not millions and billions. e.g. 1,000,000 (1 million) is 10,00,000 (10 lacs or also spelled as lakhs) in India.
Though many people in my country are lazy and do not set the appropriate digit grouping and date format in windows. So when I see amounts in millions and dates in mm-dd-yyyy, it annoys the hell out of me.
Can anyone tell me how to set 3-2-2 digit grouping in linux?
Edited 2010-10-06 18:32 UTC
It heavily depends on the gui you’re using, but my guess is to search settings for (in priority order)…
-Regional settings
-Language
-About me
On most linux distros, that question is asked during install time or at first boot, though obviously it’s a bit too late…
Actually it depends on what country you are in. Brazil for instance flips the usage for numbers.
I was aware it probably varied by region; but seriously why? Why wouldn’t some guideline be part of metric or SI notation? The other comments in this thread mention even odder decimal groupings… It makes no sense that almost every nation agreed to metric, but not something as simple as this.
Well, ask some of those people who still use the Farenheit system…
As much as there’s nothing intrinsically better in the metric system than in the yard/feet/inch system, the Farenheit scale is much, much less logically defined than the Celsius scale, so there’s no theoretical reason why people should not make the switch.
Guess it’s something like national pride…
Exactly. You may want to read Denis Guedj, Le m~A¨tre du monde.
You wrote it: almost. I’m asking myself the same questions. Even more important, than these separator, is the adherence to the SI measures… Some use miles, ounces and gallons instead of meters, grams and liters.
And someone needs to learn that this is not the case in other parts of the world…
In UK schools they are no longer taught to use a coma I believe it is now the space that is preferred. The decimal point there to me indicates 80 not 80 000
and I am British
When I did GCSE Maths (now around 5 years ago) we were told to add commas if we liked, but that it might hamper understanding. Now as an engineering student the space seems to have become the default option – but as you can’t have less than a whole person I just assumed that the “decimal” point was being used to split thousands.
On average in Britain families consist of 2.3 people…
I see that a couple of people have made 0install feeds for OpenOffice. There’s Anders’ feeds for it here:
http://afb.users.sourceforge.net/zero-install/interfaces/openoffice…
http://afb.users.sourceforge.net/zero-install/interfaces/ooo4kids.x…
and Aleksey from Sugar Labs has made one too for ooo4kids, with packages for a huge number of different languages:
http://services.sugarlabs.org/ooo4kids
It seems like it wasn’t as easy as it could have been, though:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.zero-install.devel/…
If LibreOffice is interested in making this work better, I’m sure they’d be welcome on the mailing list:
http://0install.net/support.html
This will actually get more interesting down the road. When we can compare the next version of OO with the next version of LO. Then we will actually be able to see what direction each one is going in and say “This one is better”
In each consecutive version they will diverge more and more…
Edited 2010-10-06 19:47 UTC
Unless there’s some way in the GPL to prevent this, I can guarantee you, Oracle will not do a single new thing with OO.o. They’ll just copy the improvements of LO and trade off brand familiarity. They may even package a commercial office suite based on OO.o, stealing the LO work.
Where is the harm in that? Users still win.
They can’t do that … that is one thing the GPL really does prevent. If they distribute something which includes LO GPL code, then the LO code has to be distributed as open source. At best Oracle can distribute proprietary add-ons.
They can in fact distribute a commercial OpenOffice, they just have to release the code as well — unless it is theirs in fact.
And as can be seen on ebay there are people earning — or have earned — a lot of money by just renaming Open Office and selling it for a few bucks.
It this case the haven’t “stolen” LO code. No problem there.
In this case the people selling something rebranded are in clear violation of trademark law, and they can be prosecuted.
No. Rebranding is not illegal. I can call OpenOffice “Mat’s Office” and be done with it. Actually that is what happened with LO.
The only thing I have to do is a notice somewhere that “Mat’s Office” is GPL, and as most people don’t read all those EULAs anyway most people would not notice.
Yes. Sorry, you are correct.
It is trying to sell something different as being the name-brand thing that is illegal. that is, pretending that what you are selling is something that it is not. That is the wrong way around for the situation on ebay, where people are pretending that OpenOffice (which has the name) is something else obscure.
Sorry, I confused myself there for a while.
And even if that happened what would be so bad?
That is what the GPL is about: Do something and you have to share it. Do nothing and well you have to do nothing.
You could say that this is a backdraw, but writing a general license that would avoid that is not easy and when looking at GPL 3 even “slight” changes aren’t generally accepted.
I wonder would there be any collaboration in the future between these two OpenOffice variant or would Novell’s association with Microsoft be a hindrance to many developers/contributors. I use Go-OO and I do find that their implementation is very solid and it is more responsive and polished that plain vanilla OpenOffice. Of course until we have a working LO then the debate is still open. I am not a developer/contributor, just an ordinary user, maybe more savvy than just casual – this may explain what I’m trying to say http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3794611/OpenOffic…. Would we now have a new debate of LO vs Go-OO – that would be unfortunate and counter productive.
There _is_ already a working LO and it is based on Go-OO.
AFAIK the initial version of LibreOffice already includes most of the Go-OO changes.
Ah yes. I only read it on LO’s website today:
A beta version of LibreOffice is available for download at the LibreOffice Web site. The current release is basically a rebranded version of Go-oo. For now, only RPM binaries are available for both the 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.
Thumbs up.
I was wondering about this too.
My wholly unsubstantiated opinion is that while the two projects might borrow code from each other, they won’t cooperate much more due to fundamentally different purposes. While both were created due to dissatisfaction with governance of OOo, Go-OO is about making real-world-useful improvements (e.g. compatibility with proprietary MS software/formats); on the other hand, Libre Office smacks of FLOSS fundamentalism. That doesn’t exactly sound like a match made in heaven.
Of course I could be utterly wrong. I hope they prove me so.