LinuxQuestions.org's Office Suite of the Year: LibreOffice!

users
#21

Urmas, I obviously missed the announcement that MS have a version of Office
for Linux. Can you please provide the link.

Hey, Hi!

Still waiting for the link from him/her...

#22

You're right. But the issue is how you calculate the costs. For me
proprietary licenses are unacceptable high costs for office suites. In
other words, proprietary licenses create problems and do not solve none
of my problems.

Best regards.
JBF

#23

"Valter Mura":

a version of Office
for Linux. Can you please provide the link.

Still waiting for the link...

This version is called 'wine' and it's available in your repository or at www.winehq.org/download.

#24

Yes, interesting, given that LO contains non-native components - those that
require Java VM. LO Base with HSQL even requites it.

So yes, for me there are technical parallels between MSO with
the 'emulated' runtime and LO.

History similarities are present too, both products come from large
corporations and one tried to emulate the other to address the price
issue above any other factors (from the history of StarOffice under
Sun). Both suites were completely or partially acquired from smaller
vendors (IIRC, entire OO but Base from StarDivision, PowerPoint,
Visio, Outlook Mobile, FrontPage from other companies).

So it's good to be aware of the roots.

LO started clean at some point; let's look into the future and focus
on positives.

As for the original concern -- congratulations for the 1st place but
in the current context... I don't care too much about the poll as it's
not close to something scientifically correct. Obviously Linux users
is a small population of LO users (my claim as a long time employe of
an OpenOffice vendor), too small to extrapolate the results and then
construct any hypothesis.

Yes I know this is LinuxQuestions. For the record neither I even voted
there nor any contributor of Calligra known to me told me she/he voted
this year, we have never even spread the word within the community to
vote there. I remember LQ from maybe 2006. It seems that LQ staff do
not contact the teams about their plans for subsequent polls. We can
construct other of similar scale on G+ for example. Too often people
tend to read these overly generic polls as "Cheapest Office Suite".

#25

The FOSS isn't to lower your cost. Freeware and SaaS/Freemium *are*,
among others.

If FOSS lowers your cost, +1 for FOSS and all, but it's by the way.
Long term it does because absence of issues (vendor lock-in for
example) it addresses as a consequence of its freedoms indeed lowers
the cost. But it's hard to claim that attracting by lowering the cost
was the original plan.

(you're right if by cost you mean something else than the raw money)

#26

While we tend to focus on financial costs with FOSS vs proprietary that probably is not as big an issue for many. The real problem with proprietary packages is they often use proprietary file formats. If you realize that proprietary formats impede file sharing between users because each must have a reliable way of reading the format. This leaves at the mercy of the owner of the format; will they support it in the future or even will they be in business in the future. If one remember the 80's and early 90's every word processing program used its own format. While file sharing was not a prime concern, many of the programs were produced by companies that are out of business.

#27

Hi :slight_smile:
I think my favourite answer so far has been Alex's. I liked all those
stats kinda suggesting that one reason for excluding MS Office from
the poll is just that it's sooo unpopular in Linux.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#28

Virgil Arrington-2 wrote

That said, it might be interesting to see how the poll might fare if
there were an option of "MS Office running under Wine." Does anybody
actually do that?

Four free Microsoft downloads to view file formats rtf, doc(x), xls(x),
ppt(x) flawlessly under Wine:
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=68280&p=304336#p304336