Peter Weyant Ideas and Input: 11/01/2010

Rumblings From the LibreOffice Camp Signal Good Things Ahead: "

So the big winner here in a fork for open source business application suites - Google. Anyone else with any thoughts?

We've written widely about developers of the open source OpenOffice productivity suite resigning, with broad implications for the suite and for LibreOffice, the promising new fork of OpenOffice. Although it's only been a matter of weeks since the fork was announced, The Document Foundation (TDF) and community members are working away at a new suite, and there are signs that users will see much improvement in it, as compared to OpenOffice. Judging from these signs, and what has been achieved with previous OpenOffice forks, users are still likely to win following the big OpenOffice brouhaha.

OpenOffice has millions of users, and if a fork of it achieves meaningful goals, that is good news. It's not unheard of. Many people already favor the Go-oo fork of OpenOffice, which is lighter, faster and has surprising extras. Many people lament certain problems with OpenOffice, citing its spreadsheet and database as particularly lacking.

If you're interested in checking in on the status of LibreOffice, Bruce Byfield provides a good guide to the latest information, in this post:

"Recently, though, more concrete information has been released. This information appears in LibreOffice blog entries, notably those of Charles Schultz for November 10 and October 28, and in TDF announcements, one in German and the other in English."

In Byfield's post, he also supplies more information directly from the folks at LibreOffice. Most interesting of all, it sounds like the LibreOffice suite is being retooled to put content ahead of ever more features--probably a good idea. We all consume much more content now than we used to, and OpenOffice never really detoured to reflect that trend.

Among other things I'd like to see in LibreOffice is a much improved word processor. I spend most of my day in browsers, word processors and on email, and a truly great word processor would be a great centerpiece for a new overhaul of OpenOffice.

Byfield also reports that the LibreOffice folks are looking closely at new hardware platforms. That may or may not be a good idea. Netbooks, for example, are showing less promise than they once did. Could a retooled OpenOffice have a future on tablets, though?

One thing's for sure: LibreOffice's reimagination of the OpenOffice suite is going to be a big open source story, and one that may benefit a lot of users.