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A Free-as-in-Freedom, highly structured, metadata rich, application independent XML file format like OpenDocument can finally offer two huge advantages to all computer users and to Society as a whole....

We're aiming for steady, organic growth both of ourselves and the wider LibreOffice ecosystem," Meeks said. "Collabora Productivity is here for the long term, and we have plenty of runway to build a sustainable business that delights customers."

Another day, another example of excessive DMCA takedown actions. The latest is that Microsoft has been issuing DMCA takedowns to Google directing the search engine to remove links to Open Office. Open Office, of course, is the open source competitor to Microsoft, and Microsoft has no copyright-related rights over it. As TorrentFreak points out, this does not appear to be a one-off occurrence.

Australians are whinging about the way they are overcharged for software by companies like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe. There's one obvious solution - start using free and open source software.

OpenOffice 4.0 was released yesterday by the Apache Software Foundation, bringing with it a new sidebar designed to make better use of widescreen monitors and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office documents.

It may be trailing LibreOffice, but OpenOffice is still alive and kicking -- now with better Microsoft Office Open XML support.

JULinuXP 2013 ETPE Revision 2 was released on 07-09-2013 however I waited to write this article until the FTP upload was complete to sourceforge.net. The main differences in this release are that LibreOffice was replaced by OpenOffice.

Celeum makes ARM based devices that exclusively run open source software.

Describing themselves as “a disruptive open source software company”, Open-Xchange - a team made up of some of the key developers of OpenOffice, has announced the launch of OX Documents, a cloud-based office productivity suite, featuring OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool.

LibreOffice 4.0 has been officially released one week ago. This article describes how to install LibreOffice 4.0 on Debian-based / Ubuntu-based Linux distributions, with or without replacing a previous LibreOffice version.

LibreOffice is introducing their new name and community to the world. All the major Linux distros are already aware, but there are many Windows and Mac users who don’t understand what is going on. People even become attached to names for emotional reasons.

A little more than two years after it forked from OpenOffice.org, the free office suite LibreOffice has come out with a sleek and faster version 4.0.

LibreOffice 4 has just arrived and, at first glance, this popular open-source office suite looks really good.

It was in September of 2010 that the formation of the Document Foundation was announced. It's now two and a half years later, and with the release of LibreOffice 4.0, its not only flourishing, but forging a path independent of its predecessor.

LibreOffice in recent years for an office productivity suite on the Linux desktop after disturbances resulting in LibreOffice being forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Fedora is one of the distributions that has been living with LibreOffice, OpenOffice may come back as an option in Fedora 19.

LibreOffice 4.0 is right around the bend and today Charles H. Schulz wrote why this particular version is "an existential release." Folks were wondering why the big jump in version numbers, but Schulz says there are two big reasons why the time is now. Besides the additions that will be seen by the users, his reasons go a bit deeper.

If you wish there was an English grammar checker for OpenOffice Writer, you’re in luck. Two popular extensions let you add an English grammar check to OpenOffice for free.

The move away from open source solutions by the German city of Freiburg didn't seem to add up. With some help from German friends I've dug into the report - and it is indeed suspect. We recently saw the news that the German city of Freiburg had decided to end its open source migration and instead switch to using Microsoft products again. The rationale provided seemed curious to me - after all, at the same time the German city of Munich announced total savings amounting to €10 million from its own successful and ongoing migration. What seemed odd was there was no account of how they changed course to make the migration succeed. Munich learned lessons from early challenges and updated its strategy in order to succeed. But not Freiburg.

Last week the council revealed it was contemplating the switch when it said that its hopes and expectations for OpenOffice in 2007 were not fulfilled. Continuing to use the outdated OpenOffice 3.2.1 in combination with Microsoft Office 2000 would lead to more aggravation and frustration on the part of employees and external parties as well as performance impairments, the council said.

Rarely do small business and home users need all of the features that are included in the powerful Microsoft Office suite of products. Microsoft Office is the industry leader in office productivity software, but many free alternatives exist that will satisfy the needs of most small business and home users. This gives cost-conscious business owners a way to save money while maintaining productivity.

Open source office products will include many of the features of costly programs and support all of the major file type, including Microsoft file types.

LibreOffice may have the community and momentum, but that doesn't mean it is the better choice for every document.

My current Debian Wheezy installation is an upgrade from Squeeze, so I was unprepared for what just happened: I'm doing a bunch of installs in between my other work, and I just got around to a traditional Wheezy desktop installation with the GNOME desktop using netinstall image. I was unprepared for the only GUI package manager to be GNOME Package Kit. No Synaptic Package Manager. Not even the "Sofware Center" ported from Ubuntu that shipped in Squeeze.

Office 2013 will, after years, finally fully support Open Document Format, Adobe's PDF, and, oh yes, Microsoft's own Open XML document standard.

We’ve actually seen this theory in practice on numerous occasions, and it nearly always worked out just as Torvalds predicted. As an example, take the case of LibreOffice, which started as a fork of OpenOffice.org. Most users agree that The Document Foundation has greatly improved on the original OOo code, so much so that many if not most OpenOffice users have made the switch to LibreOffice.

One of the biggest frustrations most new LibreOffice (or OpenOffice.org) users have is the lack of templates and clip art. We've addressed this problem before, but with the recent surge of LibreOffice, it's important to know how to improve your powerful office suite!

Stability enhancements and bugfixes thanks to a large, diverse and rapidly growing developer community Improvements in Calc, Impress, font handling and compatibility to third-party formats. This release fixes a number of bugs and further improves the stability of the software, making it the best version available for corporate and enterprise adoption. Among the changes are improvements in Calc, Impress, in the handling of fonts as well as enhancements with regards to importing and exporting third-party formats.

That LibreOffice continues to respond to requirements of end-users became truly evident when news of it being developed for Android OS arrived a few months ago. And now with screen shot of the progress made so far being released by its developers, LibreOffice’s progress is good to note.

Though my track record with in-place upgrades of Linux/Unix systems is far from positive, I decided to do just that with my long-running (since late 2010) Debian Squeeze laptop today. It went surprisingly well -- and by that I mean I'm using a fully upgraded Debian Wheezy laptop to create this post in Nautilus via sftp.

The Apache OpenOffice.org effort must be considered a fork of LibreOffice, even though it has its predecessor’s name. The original OpenOffice.org project is dead. (The project is dead, but the Website lingers on…) So this isn’t the original, this is a fork. It’s a bad fork: it’s bad because there are no significant complaints about the direction of the LibreOffice effort.

I believe that the current market trends make Canonical’s Ubuntu for Android project the most important development in the recent history of Linux.

“When Apache foundation released OpenOffice 3.4, many people wondered what is the point of OpenOffice existence, and what is, or what should be the current relation with LibreOffice. Unixmen came in contact with the people behind the project, and did an attempt to answer these questions through an interview with Rob Weir. It seems that many things remained unclear, or somewhat vague, so what about some more food for thought regarding this matter?

Last week, we had the first OpenOffice release, since the project was donated to the Apache foundation. This raised a lot of questions and many users wondered what is the point, or what is the difference with the Libre “brother”? In an attempt to answer these questions and learn more about how the people of the Apache foundation resurrected OpenOffice, we meet Rob Weir on this Monday interview. Enjoy!

When Apache OpenOffice 3.4 was released last week -- the first OpenOffice release under Apache - I *guessed* that it was likely a better fit for Windows and Mac users than for Linux users. As it turns out, after a week of availability, that's exactly the case.

Would a rose by any other name still smell as sweet? Or would it, perhaps, end up sweeter? That, essentially, is the question at the heart of the forking process, which in turn is at the heart of a key situation today. Namely: Now that we have LibreOffice, do we still need OpenOffice as well? In the wake of Apache OpenOffice's new update, that's been the question du jour down at the Linux blogosphere's Punchy Penguin Cafe.

First impressions may be fleeting, but I like what I see so far in Xubuntu 12.04.

As the date of the Apache OpenOffice release approaches, and the final release candidate wends its way through a couple of rounds of approval / voting, I thought it might help clarify the current situation to have a side-by-side summary of what is in each suite.

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer Linux system administration bootcamp on April 14 - 15, 2012 near San Francisco (South Bay). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas. All attendees get a free Linux laptop.

Spending a couple of days intensely running Linux Mint 12 on a very nice desktop PC sent to me for review by ZaReason (much more about that later), I probably shouldn't have been surprised by the annoying bugs in Mint that made me a lot less productive than I am in the Debian Squeeze system I've been running on my laptop since late 2010.

Simply put, the regular update release cadence of LibreOffice provides the highest quality open source office suite ever created.

With an eye on reducing ongoing software costs, the Veterans Affairs Department said it is exploring alternatives to Microsoft Corp.’s longstanding Office Suite productivity software that has dominated federal desktops for two decades. The VA currently owns and operates the 2003, 2007 and 2010 versions of Office, which include Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and which are being used by more than 300,000 VA employees. Use of the integrated software suite has provided for interoperability between the VA’s many units.

The month of February is a month to remember for the LibreOffuce project. They formally incorporated the foundation in Berlin, released 3.5 with major changes and now Intel is joining the foundation as a member. Intel will also make available the LibreOffice for Windows from SUSE in Intel AppUp center. Intel AppUp Center is an online repository designed for Intel processor-based devices.

LXer Feature: 19-Feb-2012

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup for your reading enjoyment.

As a long time user of OpenOffice.org, it really is just thrilling to see the innovation present in LibreOffice 3.5, which was officially released today. As a writer, this release has at least one update which quite literally will change the way I work, (hopefully for the better). In my business, word counts – count. In older versions of LibreOffice (and OpenOffice), I've always had to first write then select what I've written to get a word count. It's a two step process, that when repeated over the course of a day (I write at least 4 stories a day), week, month and year takes a real toll on wrists and arms (can you say Carpal Tunnel?)

Say you write a novel. This is a lengthy document which has a title page, table of contents and some chapters. You want to make page numbering start from a certain page and not include first pages like front page and table of contents. How to achieve this?

I haven't quite made the leap from using LibreOffice as my every day word processor as of yet. Thankfully, LibreOffice comes with a fairly power equation editor - if you know how to use it! The following is my personal cheat sheet for using the editor - enjoy!

Piers Anthony has been writing complete novels in Linux for 12 years. We interview him at The Powerbase.

LibreOffice is an open source Office Suite, an excellent alternative to MS Office. If offers a number of features and the added functionalities in the form of extensions. Here are some of the useful extensions for LibreOffice.

Most of us are used to seeing page numbers as Arabic numbers like 1-2-3-...-10-11-12 and so on. But what if you wanted to see numbering in Roman style: I-II-III-...-X-XI-XII? Is there any option in LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org to do so?

After months spent pondering the installation of a post-2.6.38 kernel that's actually being patched when needed for my Debian Squeeze system, I finally figured out how to add the Debian Backports 2.6.39 kernel without the operation removing every other kernel from the hard drive in the process.

It’s a new year, and LibreOffice (the office productivity suite forked from OpenOffice.org) is the new face of open source productivity software. Or is it? And more importantly, will it remain so as OpenOffice is reborn under the Apache Foundation? Here's the update.