LibreOffice 5.0 Beta 1 Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LibreOffice 5.0 Beta 1 Released

Following yesterday's LibreOffice 5.0 branching in Git, the first beta for LibreOffice 5.0 is now available for testing...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOffice-5.0-Beta-1

[edoantonioco]

Does someone remember OpenOffice? I haven't heard that name in a while, while this one continues constantly progressing

[smitty3268]

Does someone remember OpenOffice? I haven't heard that name in a while, while this one continues constantly progressing

OpenOffice was forked into LibreOffice.

A lot of the linux distros (and others) didn't like the way Sun was controlling OpenOffice development, and banded together to fork it.

OpenOffice does still exist - after the fork, Sun spun it off to the Apache foundation under a different license.

[madjr]

Does someone remember OpenOffice? I haven't heard that name in a while, while this one continues constantly progressing

A little ridiculous that we have 2 forks, am waiting for them to merge already or 1 be dropped so more devs can focus on the remaining one.

seeing how last - not so big- release of OOo was like 10 months ago...

And they seem to be asking for help:

https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/collaboration_is_in_our_dna

[bakgwailo]

OpenOffice was forked into LibreOffice.

A lot of the linux distros (and others) didn't like the way Sun was controlling OpenOffice development, and banded together to fork it.

OpenOffice does still exist - after the fork, Sun spun it off to the Apache foundation under a different license.

Almost. OpenOffice was kind of slow under Sun, but distros still used it (generally applying the GO-Office patchset on top as Sun was slow to accept patches). When Sun was sold to Oracle, Oracle stopped taking any community input/patches and generally was Oracle being Oracle, so the community forked it to LibreOffce, and then officially merged in the GO-Office patches (might have the name wrong a bit), and continued from there. Oracle finally realized that there was no money in OpenOffice and thus spun it off to Apache. The Apache project is fairly dead compared to LibreOffice, as far as I can tell, but, it did get an infusion from IBM as they released their modified Lotus Symphony stuff to OpenOffice (which LibreOffice I believe then merged in).

[Ericg]

Almost. OpenOffice was kind of slow under Sun, but distros still used it (generally applying the GO-Office patchset on top as Sun was slow to accept patches). When Sun was sold to Oracle, Oracle stopped taking any community input/patches and generally was Oracle being Oracle, so the community forked it to LibreOffce, and then officially merged in the GO-Office patches (might have the name wrong a bit), and continued from there. Oracle finally realized that there was no money in OpenOffice and thus spun it off to Apache. The Apache project is fairly dead compared to LibreOffice, as far as I can tell, but, it did get an infusion from IBM as they released their modified Lotus Symphony stuff to OpenOffice (which LibreOffice I believe then merged in).

Yeah, IBM can invest all they want into OpenOffice because the license allows LibreOffice to just incorporate the IBM changes into their codebase as well. Unfortunately for OpenOffice the licensing situation DOESN'T allow them to take LibreOffice's changes and incorporate those into THEIR codebase. Thus giving LibreOffice an automatic advantage.

[ua=42]

Open Office was basically dead while Oracle controlled the codebase. So LibreOffice was forked and all the developers left to work on it.

Currently there are many more developers working on LibreOffice. Not only that, any improvements made by the few OpenOffice developers can be merged into LibreOffice as well.

[d2kx]

OpenOffice is basically dead. Literally less than 20 people working on it and 10x the amount on LibreOffice.

[eydee]

The changelog is very short and mostly consists of UI changes. Why is the version bumped to 5.0? Any new former Mozilla programmers in the crew?

[quikee]

The changelog is very short and mostly consists of UI changes. Why is the version bumped to 5.0? Any new former Mozilla programmers in the crew?

The "traditional" versioning doesn't really fit in a fixed release schedule project (like LibreOffice, Firefox, Linux kernel) where a major version bump will never be justified for some people. This is why many other projects have adopted another versioning by now. LO might do the same - this will be decided in 5.1 release cycle.