LibreOffice Developer Community Increasingly Robust 180
New submitter someWebGeek writes "LibreOffice, the community-driven fork of OpenOffice, appears to have a very healthy and growing group of code contributors. The Document Foundation has published new stats that portray the climbing rates of developer involvement both in terms of numbers of people and numbers of code commits. One of the most encouraging aspects, as noted by Ryan Paul in an article at Ars, is that non-corporate code contributions by independent volunteers constitute the largest slice of the latest commit-pie."
Re:Large Deployments (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Large Deployments (Score:2, Informative)
I don't have Office at home (being both tight and honest) so I use LibreOffice. But it's compatibility with Office is poor. It handles most things well, but not pictures. There are so many "LibreOffice opening an Office document without pictures" bugs that there's recently been an effort to consolidate the bug reports.
If I needed it for professional work I'd buy Office. Being unable to read documents with pictures is intolerable.
I wish I could use it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Large Deployments (Score:4, Informative)
The biggest dealbreaker for me is that LibreOffice will friggin' mulch Office files. I've opened up a .docx with it, modified it, and then saved. What I got was a mess.
I have the same problem with various versions of MS Word. My solution is, sans one client, avoiding the hell out of docx files. They are awful and older versions of Word can't read them either. They are simply a bad idea.
Re:Large Deployments (Score:4, Informative)
AFAIK they are doing so ; the main use of Java is for Base, which few people use AFAIK. The secondary use of Java is for some of the file export filters - like the "flat" XML outputs which are good for some XSLT sheets. I think these are getting rewritten in C++.
Re:Large Deployments (Score:4, Informative)
Fully integrated email/calendar. The ability to send an appointment while checking others schedules AND scheduling a conference room at the same time. It doesn't help that pretty much every enterprise in the world uses outlook so you can email an outlook appointment outside your organization and have it fully work in not only adding to their calendar at the correct time and provide full details.
A small list of features:
- Email with full calendar support.
- Web-mail with most of the features of the Outlook client.
- Folders and structures including common folders that can be shared between multiple people.
- Integrated Contacts with separate personal contacts and company directories.
- Company directories can store all contact information and in the case of VOIP systems can be linked such that clicking a phone number dials the phone.
- Integrated Instant messaging and RSS feeds that can be secured and restricted to certain people.
- Task handling that will track a task list, even between multiple people and offices.
- Fully shareable calendars and other items allowing people to delegate calendar, email and other tasks to a subordinate.
- Integration of other items such as the ability to schedule conference rooms and such with a calendar appointment.
- Distribution lists, Journals, notes and Internet faxing.
- Push email and calendaring that transfers everything to a PDA/phone automatically with secure handling. Works so well emails often show up on the phone before registering on outlook/exchange.
Many other features, of course MS is one of the best companies at inter-product ties, such that there is integrated handling of all MS products including the ability to directly cut and paste document items directly into emails and have it fully handled and look and behave perfectly. This extends as well to Share-point which is a network enabled file management system that allows collaboration including multiple people in the same document over the Internet along with check-in and checkout library type handling.
It's reached the point that if outlook and exchange are down large companies can't even function. I'm not exaggerating either. I've seen personally an exchange crash idle almost the entire company while it's restored. This list was neither comprehensive nor even all the popular features. Just the ones I'm familiar with in my little tiny slice of life. As it's been stated before, most people only use 10% of the programs, but the features that make up that 10% is different for everyone, meaning everything gets used by someone but on average only a small subset is used per individual/company/business.
To replace MS Office at the enterprise level we have to replace the whole kit and kaboodle. Office, Exhange, Outlook, Sharepoint, etc, precisely because MS has tied them all together so well that they are essentially indispensable to most companies.