02 April, 2011

LibreOffice

I just stumbled upon mmeeks blog where he mentions some of his favorite projects from the LibreOffice GSoC ideas. And it made me happy.

OpenOffice = blegh

Now I've never been a big fan of OpenOffice. I saw it as a huge pile of legacy code with little future. Part of that was due to the "WE OWN OPENOFFICE" Governance from Sun/Oracle, part due the the slowness and UI horror. And part due to developers saying things like
"developing OpenOffice is like brushing your teeth with a chainsaw"
Such quotes don't inspire a lot of confidence

LibreOffice an improvement

The LibreOffice fork solves the governance issue and focusses strongly on cleaning up the code. Still I felt they still had the Millstone of the old codebase around the neck. I've always seen a lot more future for Calligra suite which has a modern code base and innovative features, especially since the inception of KO GmbH. For me, LibreOffice did not seem relevant for anything other than bridging the gap until Calligra was end user ready..
Which in itself is bad - competition is good, OO has a huge user base (slowly moving to LibreOffice now) and the LibreOffice project is a big showcase of Free Software in many ways.

Light at the end of the tunnel

So the post by Meeks lighted up a little spark in me when he mentioned moving over the Canvas to Cairo. Yes, I'm no developer, but I do know that Cairo is a modern technology, good enough to be adopted as the new canvas by the upcoming Qt4 port of Scribus (part of openSUSE 11.4). And it is what GNOME Shell is build upon, not exactly irrelevant either. Meeks also mentions an Android port which would force work on improving performance like it did for Calligra office.

So why is this so special? It's not like OO.o didn't have any plans... Well, frankly, the only improvements I've seen from OO.o over the last years was an addition like Java. Sorry but why oh why add Java to an office suite which is already slow as crap and big as a mountain? Oh, and the discussions about the "awesome UI redesign" ("let's copy the ribbon, badly"). I didn't hear about taking advantage of modern technologies like Cairo. Frankly, the improvements were mostly putting lipstick on a pig, if you ask me.

LibreOffice REALLY brings change!

So now I have the impression that LibreOffice really represents a change. Sure, it's all perception, I know. I'm sure the OO team did some replacing-of-legacy-stuff. And LibreOffice still has a HUGE amount of work to do. They still have the old code base. But the project is revitalized! With all the new developers and LibreOffice in GSoC, there is change in the air. With Calligra going incredibly strong as well (just see the number of ppl here) the Free Software office space looks to be gearing up to good stuff. I for one welcome our new Office overlords, evil or not ;-)

10 comments:

  1. I do find when starting LibreOffice on Windows that it does seem to start up quicker and load files quicker too. Dont know what they have done with it but it seems to work!

    Keep up the good work guys!

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  2. Interesting point of view.If Calligra gets the happy maturity soon do you think Calligra would be integrated in GNOME, LXDE, XFCE desktops as it's KDE proposal ?

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  3. It doesn't matter if Calligra will be integrated in gnome. It matters if it will be integrated in future Ubuntu releases which will contain Qt applications. Calligra's growing very fast and strong, so there's a big chance it will repleace LibreOffice in the future. For me, only KDE matters, so I don't even care about Ubuntu integration too much.

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  4. You have to keep in mind that the biggest install base for OOo is definitely not on Linux. It's Windows. How well Cairo works on Windows I don't know. But it definitely would be a reason why they did not choose Cairo, but stuck to something they knew worked. Keeping a cross platform codebase might have been more more important to them than having a better UI on one platform only.

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  5. Having been in one of Oracle's acquired companies, I say good fucking riddance!

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  6. About the windows support, Cairo works just fine on windows, so it's a step forward for that platform as well. Shrinking the +5 million lines of code in LibreOffice is high on their agenda, and rightly so...

    About Calligra and GNOME, well, what integration do you expect? It works on mobile phones and Windows, GNOME is just Linux, there is little extra effort required... Qt apps can use the GNOME theme and integrate quite well. Surely more work can be put in to make it better but there are no huge issues in that area.

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  7. is idea of me or
    OpenOffice copy-paste the code of Libreoffice with naming/mark/ogos/trademark obvious changes?

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  8. "Keeping a cross platform codebase might have been more more important to them than having a better UI on one platform only."

    Yes, keeping cross platform very important. Over 90% OOo installs are on Windows.

    "Cairo works just fine on windows" +1

    "Shrinking the +5 million lines of code in LibreOffice is high on their agenda, and rightly so..."

    Untangling the spaghetti of the OOo code and dumping unneeded and redundant code is the focus of LibreOffice hackers right now. Hoping that clean streamlined code will have increased load performance and also make future changes much easier to implement.

    "OpenOffice copy-paste the code of Libreoffice with naming/mark/ogos/trademark obvious changes?"

    eh? The other way around. LibreOffice is based on the OOo code base.

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  9. "For me, LibreOffice did not seem relevant for anything other than bridging the gap until Calligra was end user ready... Which in itself is bad - competition is good"

    Ha ha.

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