LWN: Comments on "Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice"

X is pretty small compared to e.g. widget toolkits. Qt is several million LOCs, much larger than Gtk, but it includes more things (not just widgets). Eclipse is also a huge code base, but I don'...

https://lwn.net/Articles/639623/

IBM is the primary funder of OpenOffice development I believe. In terms of brand, that's not actually entirely an unreasonable approach - OpenOffice from a brand side is still as strong or st...

https://lwn.net/Articles/639139/

Sometimes official sites are just as bad ... I wanted to download a "virtual CD" program I'd used in the past - Alcohol 52. So I went to the official download site, and it used this crap. Of cou...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638943/

You can't just blame Google. There are a number of places that were once good to go to and find reviews of software and download links to the software that have now made all their downloads inst...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638924/

> 42% get done differently (hard to say wether LO patches were inspired by the AOO patches or not) If you're talking about the "prefer: " ones, take a look at the referenced commit. Al...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638907/

It's most likely Google's fault. End of last year, they *finally* admitted their ads were pushing highly unwanted software, as if it was the top search result you were asking for. At least for m...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638862/

Sorry to nitpick, but the AOO and LO projects both forked off OpenOffice.org. They are sibling forks from a common parent, not parent and child. Despite the more similar name and Oracle's offici...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638855/

Thanks Jonathan for one of the most interesting and informational LWN articles in recent times! Reading the comments, I must admit I had the opposite feeling while reading the article. I felt t...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638848/

Out of curiosity, greping through that first page (50 commits): * 28% of commits get merged as-is * 42% get done differently (hard to say wether LO patches were inspired by the AOO patches or ...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638846/

Terrific analysis. Thank you. Rob Weir did some great work during the OOXML days, but seems to have brought that combative stance to the administration of OpenOffice and subsequently its relat...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638837/

These two things were closely related in both directions.

https://lwn.net/Articles/638817/

Some are in fact so openly cynical. Others aren't even aware of it personally -- it operates at a deeper level. There is the old line of Upton Sinclair's: "It is difficult to get a man to unders...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638787/

From a quick check Firefox seems to exceed 11 MLoC (.c, .cpp, .h, .hpp, .py -- 8M, .js 3M).

https://lwn.net/Articles/638573/

Browsers are far over 1M lines of code these days.

https://lwn.net/Articles/638572/

An unmaintainable one that exactly no one understands.

https://lwn.net/Articles/638562/

Subversion itself is an Apache project, but Git is also a supported SCM system at ASF. "In April, 2014, we hit the magic mark where we had more Git commits than Subversion commits." http://w...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638485/

Because Subversion was (still is?) the standard of Apache.

https://lwn.net/Articles/638466/

It is possible, but you still need a minimum of coding activity to do it. Even if your code is perfect and competitors churn a lot of bad code. However, since the project caring about code hea...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638462/

French people will pronounce it li*bro*ffice and *bro*ther is a basic English word, so there's really no problem appart from people making a fit over a latin word origin.

https://lwn.net/Articles/638461/

> Yes, they moved from Mercurial to Subversion,... They apparently moved from Mercurial *back* to Subversion (the only system ever which did not bother implementing anything for branches and t...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638457/

To me these types of articles - on community issues, social aspects, and developer diversity - are very relevant topics for LWN. The technical merits of software projects are inherently influenc...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638294/

Funny. It sounds like one could take the stuff removed from XFree86, and use that to build an entire operating system…

https://lwn.net/Articles/638291/

> The real question on the subject is not why LibreOffice hasn't > overtaken it, but rather what Apache are going to do with this > enormous asset they hold in trust....

https://lwn.net/Articles/638280/

Yes this happened to me twice, and both times unsophisticated Windows users. I think part of the blame is pronunciation difficulty with `reOffice` in LibreOffice if you have `Lib` but not `Libre...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638269/

A comparison like this between gcc and llvm would be fascinating.

https://lwn.net/Articles/638260/

I read it as LEE-BROFFIS and it's easy.

https://lwn.net/Articles/638255/

Browsers these days are huge beasts, probably ranging in the 1M lines of code each. Xorg on the other hand is no longer the huge bloated beast (code wise) it once was. Since the fork from XFre...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638243/

Probably GCC, LLVM, Xorg, possibly glibc and PostgreSQL qualify, not much else AFAICS. And yes, I'd be thrilled to see "who develops " articles on those. The time of our esteemed editor allo...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638239/

There simply aren't that many projects the size of the LO codebase. You could probably count them on one hand. It's also one of the most important user software within the free software commu...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638237/

> Personally, for me "LibreOffice" is even hard to pronounce, compared > to "OpenOffice". So when I say LibreOffice it always feels weird to > me. "Libre" is easy to prono...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638229/

There is a reason for that. A short story may illustrate. During the FSFE+Samba vs Microsoft legal issues, I got very frustrated with several organizations who persistently made statements tha...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638223/

No Cuba Libre orders for you in bars, I guess...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638169/

I go with 'leeb-roffice', with a bit of a French ʁ in the middle.

https://lwn.net/Articles/638163/

> Personally, for me "LibreOffice" is even hard to pronounce, compared to "OpenOffice". So when I say LibreOffice it always feels weird to me. It probably depends on your native language. My n...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638168/

There can be such a comparison here, since both the projects diverged from a common codebase, so commit stats, etc., are relevant. For the other projects, they may be in various states of matu...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638156/

One project forked from the other, so comparing commits is quite interesting. I actually sometimes compare KDE and GNOME commits. It's been a while, but always interesting thing to do (though di...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638155/

Personally, for me "LibreOffice" is even hard to pronounce, compared to "OpenOffice". So when I say LibreOffice it always feels weird to me. So what I want to say, when I talk about it, I stil...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638153/

It's very appropriate, as it's an objective insight into the extent of the community around a project, and the degree to which development is spread over it.

https://lwn.net/Articles/638151/

I agree that it comes off a little strong but I disagree about the probable cause: AOO's one-man Negative PR Department has been mercifully absent from the comments in all LO-related articles fo...

https://lwn.net/Articles/638139/

Sometimes one doesn't play to win, but simply to make the other guy lose.

https://lwn.net/Articles/638138/