Just had a very large client reach out and ask for LibreOffice again after moving to MS Office because they found Excel too difficult to get data in correctly. So they are going to LibreOffice for exactly the reason that everyone claims that "everyone" chooses MS Office... LO is easier to use and has better compatibility 🙂

They own licenses for both, so purchase cost is not a factor. They've used MS Office more time in the last three years. Given less time with LibreOffice and zero "price" incentive, they've chosen it as the superior product for them - with zero prompting from IT. Out of the blue the managers chose it as the better product.

It was a German closed source company back in the mid-1980s. It's a very, very old product. Sun open sourced it when they purchased it and renamed it to OpenOffice after the switch in code licensing. I suspect that it has been primarily LibreOffice longer now than it was OpenOffice!

@JaredBusch said in OpenOffice Contemplates Shutdown Amid Volunteer Drought:

@scottalanmiller said in OpenOffice Contemplates Shutdown Amid Volunteer Drought:

Makes sense. It has been nearly insane that it kept going in the light of LibreOffice all of this time. They should have merged back in long ago. We don't need those two existing side by side, it just hurts the ecosystem.

Is merged back in the right term since Libre is the fork and Open is the original?

But yeah, I agree that there is jut not enough active development for both it seems.

That's always a tough one when the original people do the forking. The code is identical at the time of the split, so one is not more original than the other (unlike cloning an animal) and moving forward the only aspects that make one the original and one the fork is the name and the team. In the case of OO or NC, the original team went with the fork, making it convoluted which is now the original. The original name, OO, went one way and the team went another.

Or, to make it more confusing, if the team makes the "new project", like in this case, one could make the case that OO is the fork of LO, even though it is newer, because ideologically the original project, momentum, team and code changed name to LibreOffice.

Code is a weird thing to think of as one being original and one not.

For vector design, I use Inkscape. I've designed some logos for people with it and it works really well. I've only used Scribus a couple of times but it seemed fine when I used it.

@coliver said:

If I remember correctly LibreOffice split off from OpenOffice because they wanted to focus on more features while OpenOffice wanted to work on stabilizing and feature compatibility.

I agree, OpenOffice should merge back with LibreOffice if they can.

Not quite. LO split off because of fears over the future of the management and the licensing of OO. Oracle bought them and was not treating the project well. There was real fear that the OO project was going to be shut down and the code removed from circulation. LO was formed to protect against that.

OO and LO then additionally had some different opinions on development direction but that was purely in addition to the major issues that caused them to split.

I'm glad to hear of any large group giving LibreOffice or OpenOffice a try. We need more variety and choice.