The first stable release LibreOffice 3.3

http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/01/25/the-document-foundation-launches-libreoffice-3-3/

by Uncle_Sam • 16 years ago

56 38 16 years ago

blog.documentfoundation.org

This is great news, I too have been upset by the lack of ugly office suites. I am glad there is another product on the market flying the flag for open source and great user interfaces.

teilo2• 16 years ago

This is not a "me too" product. It is a fork of Open Office by former Sun employees and community contributors who have had an active role in Open Office before the Oracle acquisition. There is now more active development under this liberated model than there was when Sun was the steward of the project. The project is moving forward as never before. This is a good thing.

If you don't care for Open Office, then there is nothing here for you here. But for those of us who do care, and use Open Office every day this is good news. It means that the project will not be impeded by the heavy hand of Oracle, a corporate interest who is only interested in promoting open source in so far as it keeps away the bad press.

FWIW: Libre Office finally displaced Neo Office on my Mac, which is to say that the code base has improved quite substantially.

ddfall• 16 years ago

A bit more background: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/LibreOffice-3-3-final...

greyman• 16 years ago

In my opinion (and personal experience), if they want to endanger the monopoly of MS Office, they would need, first of all, to provide 100% compatibility with the MS Office formats [read them and write to that format flawlessly].

At least for me, that was the reason my repeated evaluation of OpenOffice always failed - it couldn't handle more complex MS Word files I received from my colleagues, and it just didn't make sense to use both suites. I gave it a chance again and again, but it never worked for me despite my honest attempts to like OO.org.

omh2• 16 years ago

This doesn't seem like a realistic possibility. There isn't 100% compatability even between different versions of Office itself.

ericb2• 16 years ago

I think the point is valid and the possibility realistic if we don't assume a literal interpretation of "100% compatibility".

e40• 16 years ago

I agree, but this is harder said than done. And, MS makes it hard by making it a moving target.

mathnode2• 16 years ago

There is no reasonable justification for any individual, institution, or business to be using the newer MS office file formats.

zoomzoom• 16 years ago

But they already are, so we have to support them now. That is the problem.

omh2• 16 years ago

How about wanting to support more than 65k rows in Excel?

rbanffy4• 16 years ago

The world would be a much better place if people were reasonable.

Unfortunately, lots of people use Office formats like fashion. They don't want to use "outdated" formats.

ams6110• 16 years ago

And it's not even necessarily complex. Almost any MS Word doc that I get will be rendered incorrectly in OO if the document contains imbedded graphics (e.g. a logo). And vice-versa.

Create2• 15 years ago

Please file this embedded graphics issue in https://bugs.freedesktop.org//enter_bug.cgi -> LibreOffice with an example attachment of your document (e.g. the logo).

Even better, save as PDF on MS Office as it looks, and a save as PDF as it looks to you, while you describe the difference. It is very hard to find the compatibility mismatches otherwise -- especially the ones you need: it would be nice to have documents to test the correct rendering.

Create2• 16 years ago

Please file your issues in https://bugs.freedesktop.org//enter_bug.cgi -> LibreOffice with an example attachment.

nervechannel2• 16 years ago

Dear gods, please, someone give it a better name.

Sadly, superficial things like names are important if you want to compete with better-known products.

I can't even pronounce LibreOffice fluidly -- there are no words in English (I think) with a schwa followed immediately by a short 'o' sound, so no native English speaker is phonologically equipped to deal with it.

davnola• 16 years ago

"leeb-roffis" works for me

rdtsc2• 16 years ago

Does it even need to have the word 'office' in the name?

They could have just picked a short web 2.0 missplelled-on-purpose-with-missing-vowels name, that's easy to say and search for.

mathnode2• 16 years ago

Libr?

thomas11• 16 years ago

Then MS Office users who aren't computer geeks wouldn't associate it with MS Office at all. In the IE vs. Netscape battle it probably was a big factor that "Internet Explorer" had the work "internet" in it - if a computer-illiterate person wants to surf the internet, which icon will they click?

omouse• 16 years ago

It's a great name, it prominently displays Liberty. This is much better than Open because the word 'open' is being used for all kinds of software that isn't (Open Document Format vs Office Open XML)

skymt• 16 years ago

Ideologically it's good, aesthetically and phonetically not so much.

dpcan• 16 years ago

Interesting. I never thought of it as "liberated office", I thought of it as "without charge office / free office" and I despise the name LibreOffice.

Hey. Why don't they call it LibertyOffice? That would be awesome.

nervechannel2• 16 years ago

It may be a 'great' name ideologically, but the fact that there are three other comments in the thread giving three different ways it's pronounced, shows a certain degree of name fail.

EDIT: Sorry, five different pronunciation suggestions at last count.

iwwr• 16 years ago

I suggest Red Stapler Office.

teilo2• 16 years ago

Just put a soft glottal stop between the schwa and the o, or just pronounce them as two words.

nollidge• 16 years ago

I take the "libre" as (sort of) a Spanish "lee-bray", so it's no more difficult to pronounce than "payoff" or "layover".

sandGorgon• 16 years ago

yes - please. I wrote about it previously : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129846

Not sure where you are from, but this definitely doesnt work in Asian countries.

wazoox• 16 years ago

Libre is from French, so it would be said "libroffis" which works fine.

codelust• 16 years ago

If you are on Snow Leopard, it is imperative to install this one. NeoOffice and OpenOffice (Goo or otherwise) have struggled on Snow Leopard with either extreme sluggishness or an inability to reasonably render all documents with acceptable loss of fidelity. Things have been considerably better with LibreOffice 3.3 so far.

shareme• 16 years ago

If on Ubuntu 10.04 x86:

Install via update script will fail. Manually install one deb package than re-run update script which fixes the problem.

mdaniel2• 16 years ago

I will also remind our technically savvy readership that they offer BitTorrent downloads, if you wish to save them some hosting costs (and speed up the downloads for your neighbors).

Interestingly enough, they offer torrents for the source code, too, but per archive, which is kind of a drag.

Transmission and I are seeding until 300%.

The first stable release LibreOffice 3.3

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