[arch-general] Dropping Oracle OpenOffice

[Ng Oon-Ee]

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.