Fedora To Look At Reviving Apache OpenOffice

Most Linux distributions have switched over to using LibreOffice in recent years for an office productivity suite on the Linux desktop after disturbances resulting in LibreOffice being forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Fedora is one of the distributions that has been living with LibreOffice, OpenOffice may come back as an option in Fedora 19.

Last night I wrote about the last round of Fedora 19 feature proposals, but a few more feature ideas crept in right ahead of the deadline for this release cycle.

One of the proposals is to offer Apache OpenOffice in Fedora 19. The feature proposal isn't about defaulting to OpenOffice over LibreOffice, but rather to just get it packaged again for Fedora.

The expressed reasoning for packaging OpenOffice again comes down to: "Donated by Oracle to the Apache Software Foundation in 2011, it is now developed and supported by a thriving community; it graduated from the Apache Incubator in October 2012 and it is now an Apache Top-Level Project. Two new versions, 3.4.0 and 3.4.1, were released in the last 8 months and a major update, 4.0, is in the works and scheduled for April 2012. Versions 3.4.0 and 3.4.1 totalled 35 million downloads so far (not counting mirrors)."

Bringing back OpenOffice to Fedora's repositories comes via Andrea Pescetti of the Apache project.

Other last-minute proposals for Fedora 19 included:

Federated VoIP - Making it easier to deploy federated SIP and XMPP/Jabber networks.

Firewalld Lockdown - The desire for a simple configuration setting for the firewalld firewall service to lock-down configuration changes from local applications.

Firewalld Rich Language - Another desire for this default firewall service on Fedora is to add a rich high-level language that allows creating complex firewall rules without needing to know the iptables syntax.

NetworkManager Bonding - NetworkManager will hopefully gain the support to configure bond master interfaces with common options and recognize their existing configuration while not disrupting their operation.

NetworkManager Bridging - Support for NetworkManager to configure bridge interfaces.

oVirt Engine 3.2 - Version 3.2 of oVirt will bring many features and should be included in Fedora 19. Changes for oVirt 3.2 include UI plug-ins, port mirroring, improved quotas, importing of existing Gluster Clusters, automatic storage domain upgrade, and other features.

PCSD COnfiguration Wizards - Easier building of configuration wizards for the Pacemaker/Corosync GUI through a simple configuration file.

Realmd FreeIPA Support - Allow Realmd to discover FreeIPA domains, in addition to its existing handling of Active Directory domains.

Systemtap 2.2 - A new version of Systemtap will likely be introduced in Fedora 19. Among the features to then be offered by Systemtap in Fedora include native Java per-method probing capabilities, a suite of error-explanation man pages, perf event provides can be read on demand, and more.

Thermostat 1.0 - Packaging Thermostat is a possibility for Fedora 19. Thermostat is a serviceability and instrumentation tool for OpenJDK Java.

Hopefully many of these features (plus the other features talked about previously on Phoronix) will be approved for Fedora 19 and not turn out to be an implementation disaster like what happened to Anaconda in Fedora 18.