Well done France (Did I just say that?)

Let's hope some other governments round the world realise there is life after Office. The first round of installs might be problematic, but once the installed base get up there TCO should drop well below that of Office.

The French are a funny lot, but can be remarkably practical when purse-strings are involved. I strongly suspect this is the case here and has nothing to do with the name.

Oh, and they are also quite hostile to perceived outside control. In view of the *really* open status of Libre Office, it's quite likely that was a factor.

Patents

I Microsoft had Apple's lawyers (and sheep-like following) they could claim they invented the spreadsheet, the word "office" and even electronic writing. Any similar configuration of numbers in a grid should earn the competition an instant ban.

Well, they need the rewriting...

I've not used LibreOffice since the fork, so perhaps things are different, but I've long found OpenOffice a pretty hideous combination of huge bloat and badly designed user interface, trailing Microsoft by two generations. It would require a great deal of rewriting to make it otherwise, it seems to me; and if you look at the problems of Firefox on Android, desktop bloat ported to a smartphone is pretty painful. But the details of their planned rewrite around HTML5 does seem to suggest that they plan that - so good luck to them.

I don't see LibreOffice passing the approbation process necessary to be accepted in Apple's appstore.

Apple will argument that LibreOffice provides functionality already existent, that they use too much battery or something like that in order to avoid people jumping from their own payed apps to free ones.

R

Interesting

A proper 100% browser-based office tool could be great - gdocs is very limited and Office365 IIRC requires some installed component(?)