LibreOffice Is Taking Shape With Third Beta - PCWorld Business Center

Image via WikipediaLibreOffice Is Taking Shape With Third Beta - PCWorld Business Center

It's been less than two months since the Document Foundation announced that it was launching its own "fork" of the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, but already its new LibreOffice alternative is beginning to take shape.

On Thursday the third beta version of LibreOffice 3.3 was released, and it's available for download for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. While not intended for production use, the current version of the free, fully open source software gives an early glimpse at LibreOffice's reinterpretation of office productivity, and it's an exciting one.

‘Our Code Base Is Getting Old'

LibreOffice 3.3 is based on OpenOffice.org 3.3, but it adds numerous code optimizations and new features that offer a first preview of new development directions for 2011 and beyond.

First, developers are now working full steam at improving the overall quality of the OpenOffice.org code, with a focus on easy testability and quality assurance. New developers and code hackers are handling the bulk of this activity, the group said.

"Our code base is getting old," explained Charles Schulz, a member of the Document Foundation's steering committee, in a recent blog post. "Worse, the whole frigging software looks and feels like we're stuck in the Bush area. Many things were not fixed, some others need a complete rewrite."

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Microsoft Ad Trashes OpenOffice.org - PCWorld

Microsoft Ad Trashes OpenOffice.org - PCWorld

A recent Microsoft video suggests the company considers OpenOffice.org a significant threat to its own Office suite.

Titled "A Few Perspectives on OpenOffice.org," the video features a series of horror stories from customers who tried the open-source productivity suite and suffered from excess costs as well as IT resources, performance and compatibility issues.

A series of customer quotes flashes across the screen in the slickly animated video, read aloud by a series of unseen narrators. "If an open-source freeware solution breaks, who's going to fix it?" according to a statement ascribed to a school district official in the U.S.

"When we returned to Microsoft Office after our experience with OpenOffice, you could practically hear a collective sigh of relief across the entire district," states another comment attributed to a U.S. school system official.

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Obviously Microsoft is feeling the pain of losing some of its dominance in the office suite category of software. I recommend that my college students download Open Office all the time. I have never received any complaints or experienced a problem with their files. I have used Open Office, Microsoft Office 2007 and 2008 (Mac) as well as Apple's iWorks suite and found that Open Office correctly opened some Word files that iWork's Pages cannot handle. I highly recommend using Open Office. Microsoft is running scared and they should.

John H. Armwood

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