Not so long ago, OpenOffice.org was the less attractive project of the Linux ecosystem. You would need it, you would use it daily but you would not think it was possible to contribute to that project or to improve it in any way.
It was a necessary pile of spaghetti code from the eighties that only Michael Meeks was able to understand. He was even spending every FOSDEM trying to convince you that compiling OpenOffice was not so bad, that it took only a couple of weeks and a few terabytes of hard disk.
Then, in only one year, multiple things happened:
- OpenOffice.org was forked into LibreOffice
- Lanedo, my employer, started to offer services around LibreOffice.
- The first LibreOffice Conference took place in Paris.
The achievements of this year are amazing.
- LibreOffice managed to build a strong and really friendly community. The conference was packed by awesome people and I immediately felt welcomed.
- Michael Meeks did a demo of LibreOffice OnLine (Lool), a version of LibreOffice displayed in your browser thanks to GTK+3 and its Broadway backend.
- The Région Île-de-France announced that they will ship hundred of thousands of USB keys with LibreOffice to their students. They will be shipped with an extension that allows direct access to their own cloud server. That extension was developed by Lanedo and I’m proud to be part of this project.
- Other personal achievement: I gave a talk about Usability in LibreOffice which resulted in an afternoon-long meeting with insanely great usability guys. I’m really delighted to see that usability will soon become a major concern of LibreOffice.
UX team improving usability of LibreOffice
But let’s not stop there. There are many more stuffs for the future:
- Work will happen on an Iphone and Android port of LibreOffice.
- Compiling LibreOffice under Linux is easier those days (and I will gladly help anyone who want to give it a try). But Windows is another story, even though most of LibreOffice users are using it. Let’s face it: building, testing and debugging LO on Windows is time-consuming and slow down the whole project. As a consequence, The Document Foundation and Lanedo decided to join their effort to improve this situation. I will cover our progress on this blog. Not that I’m particularly impatient to get my hand filthy with Windows mud but, hey, it has to be done!
If there were a TPS report, it would be great!
The conclusion of all of this is that contributing to LibreOffice is not as hard as you would think. And that I’m already impatient to attend next year’s conference.
The One year of LibreOffice by Lionel Dricot, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium License.
“You would need it, you would use it daily but you would not think it was possible to contribute to that project or to improve it in any way.”
Ehm? I can’t imagine why I would use it (OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice) … let alone daily?
I still haven’t found a reason why I would want to install it? What’s it for?
Philip Paeps,
read https://www.libreoffice.org/feature…
it is a Microsoft Office like product.
Izky > Philip is the kind of guy who doesn’t even see the need for a mouse or a GUI.
Philip > LibreOffice is a tool usually bundled with a tie and a shaver to put in a cubicle. I guess you are not the target audience
Great. Now, how about finally changing the name of the product to something less dorky-sounding that I don’t have to spell to my non-geek friends every time I recommend it to them?
If something isn’t easy to recommend to a certain audience because of its name, I’m much less likely to do so. (Cf. GIMP).
Hélas, hélas, bien que je sois un fervent défenseur du libre, il me faut bien reconnaître que Calc est très loin d’être aussi performant que son célèbre concurrent propriétaire… A quand un LibreOffice réellement utilisable dans un cadre professionnel ?
@ FUN
A quand un LibreOffice réellement utilisable dans un cadre professionnel ?
Je peux donner deux réponses radicalement différentes à cette question, dépendant du contexte.
1. Tout de suite. Je travaille dans un département de math, et le plus grand usage qu’on fait de tableurs consiste à encoder des points d’examens. Une colonne pour le nom des étudiants, une pour la cote de l’interro 1, une pour l’interro 2, une pour l’examen et une pour la moyenne.
Bref, LibreOffice est déjà parfaitement opérationnel pour un tel usage professionnel depuis déjà longtemps … pourvu que la profession consiste à encoder des cotes d’interros et de faire des moyennes.
2. Jamais. Lorsqu’on veut faire quelque chose d’un peu complexe, c’est considérablement plus efficace d’écrire un petit script en python que d’essayer d’utiliser un tableur.
Donc non, ni LibreOffice ni MS-Office ne seront, de ce point de vue jamais utilisables en milieu professionnel parce que leur conception est intrinsèquement inadaptée à un travail complexe sur de nombreuses données.
Bref, la réponse dépend complètement de ce qu’on appelle un «usage professionnel».