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09.23.13

SUSE Drops LibreOffice Backing

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Novell, Office Suites, OpenDocument at 4:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

But the motif stays green, for now…

LibreOffice

Summary: SUSE, formerly part of Novell, is no longer committed to LibreOffice

LibreOffice contributors try to put lipstick on a pig [1], but Louis Suárez-Potts (very prominent in this area) makes it clearer [2] that “SUSE has ceded development to others, if any, on LibreOffice.” There are already some distracting announcements [3,4] and on the face of it we’ll need to reconsider the role of IBM and Apache OpenOffice. Maybe they’ll be the only branch to survive one day, even if in Symphony form.

As a LATEX person, I hardly use office suites like LibreOffice, but a lot of people do [5] and this means that we may be left dependent on Apache OpenOffice, some free/libre alternatives like Calligra [6], or privacy-infringing (online) alternatives like Google Docs. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. The Spin-Off

    Some readers might be surprised by the way I’m describing the announcement. It might be tempting to see these news as the sign of the upcoming demise of the LibreOffice project. This is very far from being the case and there are two good reasons for that.

    First, Suse is NOT dumping LibreOffice developers away. The same developers basically went in a new company and there working on LibreOffice development there. In American parlance, this is called a spin-off.

  2. SUSE Partners with Collabora to Deliver Commercial LibreOffice Support | SUSE

    Basically, SUSE has ceded development to others, if any, on LibreOffice. And also calling it a “community” effort–often, if not necessarily in this case–a code term for something thrown under the bus does not inspire confidence in LibreOffice.

  3. LibreOffice Conference Scheduled published!

    Today we are happy to announce that the final schedule of the LibreOffice Conference 2013!

  4. CloudOn joins TDF Advisory Board

    CloudOn, one of the leading mobile productivity platforms that allows users to create, edit and share documents in real time across devices, has joined the advisory board of The Document Foundation (TDF).

    TDF looks after the development of LibreOffice, the free and open source office suite that competes with Microsoft Office.

  5. Styling

    Consider the way that most people use a word processor like LibreOffice’s Writer. Whenever they want to change the default formatting, they select part of the document – for example, a paragraph or a page — and then apply the formatting using the toolbars or one of the menus.

  6. Calligra vs. LibreOffice: Which Is The More Productive Linux Office Suite?

    Is LibreOffice the only worthwhile office suite for Linux users? Possibly not, thanks to KDE’s Calligra.

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