Re: Office 365 Opinions

As a happy user of LibreOffice, I don't remember any issues importing from any Word document format, although I'm sure sophisticated MS Office users would soon find differences.

And Scott is right on the meaning, "libre" is the word for "free" as in free speech, not free beer, as Richard Stallman said it long ago.



On 12/13/13 10:15 AM, Buck Calabro wrote:

On 12/12/2013 7:23 PM, Booth Martin wrote:

I believe LibreOffice is a fork from OpenOffice dating from Oracle's
decision to start charging for OpenOffice?

OpenOffice is an Apache project now. It still is cost-free. The
LibreOffice fork was over, er, creative differences. LibreOffice is
probably going to get features faster than OpenOffice, but they each
have different interoperability issues with Microsoft Office.
--buck

On 12/12/2013 1:58 PM, Scott Klement wrote:

The term 'libre' is frequently used in open source context. It's a
French and Spanish word that means free, as in "freedom" (rather than
"free" as in cost.)

This has been a constant source of discussion in the open source
communities, where "free" is supposed to mean "free as in freedom", but
it's frequently interpreted as "no cost."

In fact, one of the most common acronyms for open source software is
FLOSS which stands for "Free/Libre Open Source Software"



On 12/12/2013 1:29 PM, CRPence wrote:

FWiW the term /libre/ presumably having etymological origin with
/libertas/ is akin to /freedom/ and /unconstrained/ so the full name
LibreOffice with "Office" included, has an intended implication. And to
be clear, while the ability to obtain the source may be no-cost, the
implication of freedom is surely not solely with regard to cost, even if
with /word play/ it does; almost surely, mostly the term was chosen to
imply freedom /from/ the proprietary MS Office software :-)