Well, “Jungle out there” is not only a song by Randy Newman, it is a big problem of open-source office-suites. There is not only the traditional “OpenOffice”, there are also two forks: “LibreOffice” and “White Label Office”. I do now, that this was some time ago, but I do think, that it is very important.
I prepared a chart about the way the three suites (or better the community beyond) behaves.
Apache OpenOffice |
White Label Office |
LibreOffice |
|
| How many releases in the past six month (excluding betas and RCs ) | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| Last release (including betas and RCs ) (Format: DD.MM.YY) Deadline: 19.02.2012 |
12.04.11 (OpenOffice 3.4 beta) | 23.12.11 (White Label Office 3.3.1 rc1 ) | 14.02.12 (LibreOffice 3.5.0) |
| Why are there that less releases? (my opinion…) | Because the code has to be transformed, so that it is compatible to the Apache license | This RC was just a protest against the slow release plan of Apache OpenOffice | I can’t complain here…. |
| From which of the other two open source office suites could be code taken?? | None – Because of their license | From both | From both |
You may have noticed why the jungle must be cleaned. For me, and this is just my opinion, there is not enough manpower to win against any other office suite or against the goliath “Microsoft Office”. All of us should take a deep whistle of the peace train and we should agree on a name, because basically we do want the same.
Florians Mind 