On Fri, 2011-03-11 at 01:33 +0100, Linas wrote:
Ng Oon-Ee wrote:
Dedicated to the relatively-closed and more-constrained version of whats in the repos. Sure =)
The distros have jumped fast, but I'm wondering about the Windows users of openoffice, seems to me none of them would try libreoffice just because its there (and frankly the politics of the thing just doesn't cut it with most users in that camp). Idle thoughts...
Their problem is that they don't have an upgrade path. Distros can (and should) show libreoffice-X.Y as updates to openoffice X.(Y-1) so the update can go smoothly. But Windows users don't have that.
I installed libreoffice on windows today at work. OpenOffice had warned me about a new version and only after it had downloaded and extracted everything and it opened the installer splash screen with the Oracle logo did I notice. I cancelled the install and went to libreoffice.org, but most users won't be aware of the issue and so will continue using the Oracle version.
The Oracle version continues to exist, and its highly unlikely oracle would generously offer their customers an easy update path to libreoffice. The distros are not under Oracle's control, so Linux users get what the distros choose to give them. Unfortunately, this probably means that a few years from now libreoffice will perhaps be very linux-centric.