LibreOffice Pushes Back, Releases 3.6.3

by Susan Linton - Nov. 01, 2012Comments (11)

Yesterday Rob Weir said he didn't believe the LibreOffice user numbers. Apparently, he's been accusing The Document Foundation of discouraging contributions to OpenOffice as well. The folks at TDF are not happy and some pushed right back today. In related news, LibreOffice 3.6.3 was announced today too.

Boy oh boy, it seems the rivalry between the two popular office suites is heating up. After Weir's blog post yesterday questioning the LibreOffice download numbers given in a recent announcement, Italo Vignoli became angry according to one post today. After regaining his composure he said Weir's recent words are "the backlash of a scared man."

Vignoli first said those figures given in that announcement were "estimates," which was one of Weir points. But he followed that up with the list of new LibreOffice converts:

Maybe, if the French Government, the City of Munich in Germany, the Hospitals of Copenhagen in Denmark, Regione Umbria, Provincia di Milano and Consorzio dei Comuni della Provincia di Bolzano in Italy, the City of Limerick in Ireland, the Câmara Municipal de Vieira do Minho in Portugal, the City of Grygov in the Czeck Republic, the City of Las Palmas in Spain, the City of Largo in Florida, the municipality of Pilea-Hortiatis in Greece and the Public Library System of Chicago - amongst the others - had not chosen to migrate to LibreOffice, then Mr Weir would have ignored The Document Foundation.

In addition, Weir today publicly accused "certain external parties" of contacting OpenOffice developers, especially new ones, and trying "to discourage them from contributing to the Apache OpenOffice project." He also said, "certain external parties were contacting journalists who mentioned OpenOffice and telling them that it was no longer being developed and to link to a different product instead."

Italio quickly repudiated the accusation saying, "Do you really think that journalists would listen to someone bashing another company, organization, project or product? Really? I suppose that journalists are going to be sincerely flabbergasted by your words, as they show the utmost consideration you have of their wits and independence.

Your message is a testament of your attitude. In fact, only someone who has spent the last 24 months bashing with rabid language and spreading FUD over The Document Foundation and LibreOffice could conceive such an ill concept about the media."

In related news, The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.3, the third update to the 3.6 series. Some of the improvements include a "fix for layout problems with version 3.6 and up, don't add old cond formats if new ones are already loaded," and "FILESAVE: crash when i have delete rows." Download the new release from www.libreoffice.org.

In other news, LibreOffice Quality Heros were posted today.

Previous: HP Reiterates Dedica...Next: On ARM Servers and P... Browse Blog

by an anonymous user on Nov. 01, 2012

Let's hope this one makes the LO PPA.

1 Votes

by Paul on Nov. 02, 2012

Sad to see the fight between LO & OOo, 2 programs I have benefited so much from & still do. I hope this needless fight is resolved soon.

I am sure monopolist must be licking its chops in glee!

1 Votes

by Ed on Nov. 02, 2012

Regarding Rob Wier's usage accusation, jingoist reporting in American news media has become the norm. There's always been a bias factor of course but at least previously there was implied push to avoid it, now we relish and support it.

As for the Libreoffice

1 Votes

by an anonymous user on Nov. 02, 2012

According to http://www.robweir.com/blog/who-is-rob-weir it seems to me, Rob Weir is simply telling IBM agenda...

0 Votes

by Sum Yung Gai on Nov. 02, 2012

Shame that Mr. Weir felt the need to resort to that. Given the exciting work being done with LibreOffice, why would Mr. Weir want to join forces with The Document Foundation instead of denigrating its work? I wonder what his motivations for this really are.

Shame that it took so many original OpenOffice.org developers jumping ship and forming LibreOffice to get Oracle to release the OpenOffice name to Apache. Had they (or Sun) done that way back, the fork wouldn't have happened in the first place. Reminds me of XFree86 and X.org a few years back.

--SYG

1 Votes

by Fozzly Bar on Nov. 03, 2012

The real joke is that both suites really suck and always have. They had a bit opportunity and were given 10 years to take advantage of it.

The door is still open but google docs/drive are slowly closing it. Soon people will forget about LO and OO completely.

0 Votes

by an anonymous user on Nov. 03, 2012

Oh, surely people will very soon forget about the non-Microsoft offices. Some people proclaim this for already 10 years.

The same people proclaim this about Linux for 20 years, about the Apache HTTP server for almost that, etc. They also said the same about Android, Firefox etc...

0 Votes

by an anonymous user on Nov. 04, 2012

yeah until the first time they can't get to google docs because of a network failure, or because google decided that their content violates some stupid part of their eula... no cloud service will ever take the place of locally stored and executed software for important tasks.

0 Votes

by K. Darien Freeheart on Nov. 05, 2012

OpenOffice is more stable, has better brand recognition, and is far less green. Green is my favorite color, but there's something about Electric Lime that actually makes me just use Abiword.

Anyway, they should just remerge. The original fork was over the fears that OOo was going to be made less free by Oracle but that issue doesn't exist anymore.

Rather than bragging about "how many people installed this" or whatever, they should be selling to DEVELOPERS. Bleed the other dry by selling the advantages of why the their fork is superior. The fact that "they can't" would immediately be proof that there's room in the market for both products.

I suspect that it COULD be done though. Libre Office could be used as an Apache Openoffice test bed of new features, while a set of developers polish, reduce bugs and then ship stable as Openoffice.

Imagine... with cooperation like that (rather than squabbling), the OpenOffice brand might actually ship standard on computers.

Or not.

0 Votes

by an anonymous user on Nov. 15, 2012

@K. Darien Freeheart:

The LibreOffice fork started before Oracle bought Sun, and was a result of Sun's Star Division neglecting the needs of Linux distros combined with "copyright-political" agreements & disagreements between Sun and some other companies working on OOo. IBM's role in all this has been a lot more perverse than Oracle's BTW.

But of course Oracle's reputation speeded up some things too, if only because it came at the "right time" to help LibO and hurt OOo/AOO.

0 Votes

by stefer on Nov. 16, 2012

I used open office for years. I got the impression that in two years of Libre office development, the LO team has accomplished more than OO ever did (at least what I observed).

TBH I don't really see the point in developing both versions, but to each his own.

0 Votes

Share Your Comments

Explore Software in this Blog Post

OpenOffice has 25 reviews

LibreOffice has 0 reviews

Featured Members

View

al lamb

I have been involved in the programming field sinc...

View

Mark Hinkle

Mark Hinkle is a passionate open source advocate w...

Partner Center

Happening Now on OStatic

happy commented on HTC Hero: The First Android Phone with a Slick, Customizable Interface

acurate plumber commented on Research and Organize Your Family Tree With Gramps

thewheelchair commented on ResearchGATE Applies Open Source Principles to Scientific Collaboration

OStatic

LibreOffice Pushes Back, Releases 3.6.3