Intel joins The Document Foundation, pushes LibreOffice Intel has begun distributing the open source LibreOffice suite via its online AppUp Store, and has joined the board of The Document Foundation (TDF) – a decision that will have many of the Redmond old-guard fuming. "I have been using LibreOffice from day one for presentations at conferences and for data analysis," said Dawn …
Have I jumped into a parallel universe? Microsoft advertising Windows on ARM and Intel advertising alternatives to MS products? What will be next - Intel producing ARM processors? MS Office for Debian? VMWare offering KVM? IBM building SPARC servers? Oracle giving away their RDBMS under the LGPL license?
Is that Nazareth in the background playing "Dream on..."?
"Intel producing ARM processors?"
Too late - Intel actually used to do so (StrongARM). They have stopped *for now*, but if Win8 on ARM takes off, Intel may very well decide to go with the flow, re-license ARM, implement it with their Tri-Gate tech, and start to seriously hammer on everybody else's power consumption - remember, they've been able to make the X86 (that dog of an "architecture") run on low power, image what they could do with an ARM.
Yup. Linux kernel names are way more sensible. Looking at the current version:
$ grep NAME Makefile
NAME = Saber-toothed Squirrel
Hmm. That's odd. Let's look at some older ones ...
$ git checkout v3.1 -- Makefile ; grep NAME Makefile
NAME = "Divemaster Edition"
see - that's not silly (bizarely not connected to operating systems, but not silly)
$ git checkout v3.0 -- Makefile ; grep NAME Makefile
NAME = Sneaky Weasel
Oops - silly again
$ git checkout v2.6.39 -- Makefile ; grep NAME Makefile
NAME = Flesh-Eating Bats with Fangs
Hmmm - Ok - perhaps Linux kernel versions *are* silly.
I'm Acting Secretary for the volunteer organization I belong to. The previous officers all distributed Word documents but started using PDF once .docx hit. I use emacs+XeLaTeX to directly generate PDF's of all the monthly documents and have received tons of praise for how nice the reports are now. With some nifty "modes" emacs has made me far more productive than I ever was using Word or any other "word processor" and everyone has something which can display PDF's no matter how old or unusual their computer, even my FreeBSD systems.
With IBM pumping out no cost, ODF Lotus Symphony (OpenOffice), Oracle pushing OpenOffice (sort of) and SUSE/RH with their Libre deal, maybe the ODF and no cost productivity software will finally take off. It is crazy that people still pay $400 for productivity software.
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It's crazy that people still pay (anything) to have a new office document file format installed; that will then annoy the hell out of everyone they work with by causing them to need an upgrade. While we're at it, I may as well mention how much us Linuxtards loath people who fling their .docx turds around completely oblivious to how inconsiderate it is.
Here's a tip:
If you want me to edit it, send it in a non-proprietary format.
If you don't want me to edit it, send it as pdf, ps, or other non-proprietary format.
It's not even "productivity" software, is it? I can't help think that actually if people didn't have PPT and Word but had a few doctypes and a Visual Notepad equivalent instead, and focused on content rather than presentation, we'd ALL get more work done.
Does anybody anywhere ever pay list price for Office, or does list price exist only in the minds of MS marketing executives and their channel equivalents, and so that corporate purchasing departments can be lied to about how much money they've "saved" by signing an extra extra special multi-year discount deal with their local certified Microsoft dependent corporate reseller?
I have to agree here, for confidentiality reasons I cannot publish how much our company pay for office licences but I can say that is no where near 400$. MS Office itself is not a major cost per employee.
MS Office is not free but is not that expensive either when you consider how much use it actually gets in the workplace.
The free office versions suffer from the same problem as Linux., it's free but nobody wants it except the geeks.
Why, because Microsoft have always aimed their products at business rather than home users and they are very good at what they do in terms marketing strategy, EASL licencing deals, business support, one point of contact for the business, covering most of the business software needs etc...
Most of the geeks look at software from a users point of view, you have to see it from a business point of view and the pendulum starts to swing differntly.
I am not a MS advocate but what other company is capable of providing the same requirements in a similar package.
Whether you really need or just think you need MS Office it can only be a good thing that there is choice. Choice in OS, software is good. NOBODY would put up with just one car manufacturer, supermarket, etc.
I used MS Office for years at work but find that LibreOffice is just fine for personal use. It may be a little slower or be missing some features at the moment but as I run 6 PCs I certainly find that zero cost is a big incentive. In any case I'm all Linux so Office isn't an option even if I felt the need.
I do know that LibreOffice copes far better with reading old or odd formats of data and that I will not have massive upgrade costs and upheaval when the next version comes out - unlike MS Office.
Office is licensed to millions via Corporate contracts. Companies blindly license Office - a so called "no brainer". Office will dominate for the next 10 years at least and hence Microsoft will be making a profit until then (a new OS will prompt people to get their wallets out as well but Office is the cash cow).
That used to be the case.
The XP->Vista transition broke that rule. Lots of corporates are still quite happy with XP.
"Office is licensed to millions via Corporate contracts"#
Yeah, and how many of them are paying for the right to use The Ribbon while still using Office 98? OK I exaggerate, but only slightly.
It may not be this way forever. MS's profits are so intertwined with the MS ecosystem of certified Microsoft dependent business partners that if a few of the 'partners' start going "off message" because punters no longer like the message and see better value elsewhere, the whole house of cards could topple surprisingly quickly.
Tried to use it in a small office situation, but it was so riddled with bugs of every kind, and the killing blow was its interoperability with MS Office 2010 docx/xlsx format was terrible. (Documents edited in LIBO ended up with severe errors or wouldn't even open at all sometimes in MSO2010)
No matter how much I may like the product, if I can't send documents to other people who are inevitably married to MS products and expect them to be able to open/edit them, it's a showstopper.
I still have it on one of my boxes but I'm lucky I only use it there for the simplest tasks, and typically don't require collaborating with the inevitable MS-using masses.
The version of LO from libreoffice.org registers itself as:
LibreOffice 3.5 (en-US,af,ar,as,ast,be,bg,bn,bo,br,brx,bs,ca,ca-XV,cs,cy,da,de,dgo,dz,el,en-GB,en-ZA,eo,es,et,eu,fa,fi,fr,ga,gd,gl,gu,he,hi,hr,hu,id,is,it,ja,ka,kk,km,kn,ko,kok,ks,ku,lb,lo,lt,lv,mai,mk,ml,mn,mni,mr,my,nb,ne,nl,nn,nr,nso,oc,om,or,pa-IN,pl,pt,pt-BR,ro,ru,rw,sa-IN,sat,sd,sh,si,sk,sl,sq,sr,ss,st,sv,sw-TZ,ta,te,tg,th,tn,tr,ts,tt,ug,uk,uz,ve,vi,xh,zh-CN,zh-TW,zu) (OOO350(Build:13))
I thought I might try this Major language version from Intel, but it looks like I have to install AppUp first?
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