LibreOffice has opened a new online storage facility to house extensions and templates for its open source productivity-software suite, as well as for OpenOffice software and compatible applications. The site, which is currently in beta, has been set up so that users would have a single point of contact for all open extensions …

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Tuesday 13th September 2011 09:00 GMT Anonymous Coward

Will this also be embedded sometimes?

Having a site to share templates and such is a nice idea, but you'll really start making a difference once users can access the online repository right from within the application. Its one of the features which immediately managed to catch my attention when I moved to MS Office 2010.

Its also something I always failed to understand; Sun was living their motto "the network is the computer" yet applications like OpenOffice never showed any signs of it, whereas the direct competition graciously picked up on the idea and expanded it quite dramatically.

I'm also not too sure if the "fanatical" (maybe a bit too harshly worded...) "anti-commercial take" is a good idea.

One of the things which I really liked about the online Word repository was having access to templates for official documents which were developed and shared by companies. A lawyer firm sharing some of their ideas for official documents like complaint forms, some consultancy firms sharing templates for hour sheets. All from a commercial perspective (lets not kid ourselves; of course they hope you'll remember their company name) but still all free of charge.

Still; I really applaud this development, it sure is a good step in the right direction!

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Tuesday 13th September 2011 09:17 GMT Andus McCoatover

“We’re not Google; we’re not going to stay in beta for 10 years"

Priceless dig! Classic.

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Tuesday 13th September 2011 09:17 GMT Anonymous Coward

portable

Can't be that "portable" if it comes in Windows EXE form, and hence not portable to Linux/Mac

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Tuesday 13th September 2011 09:38 GMT mhenriday

As a LibreOffice user,

I applaud this initiative, but unlike Andus McCoatover above, I find the Google dig gratuituous - in the event that Italo did in fact make it and it's not something that Ian Thomson inserted into the conversation in order to confirm to Reg standards. The Google product that was in beta status longest is Gmail - released as an invitation-only service on 1 April 2004 and to the general public on 7 February 2007. Beta status was removed on 7 July 2009. Ten years in beta ? Considering the Reg's journalistic standards and the fact that it has been around since 1994 (then in the guise of «Chip Connection», perhaps we're looking here at the world's longest alpha - 17 years and counting....

Henri

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1. Tuesday 13th September 2011 10:15 GMT Dave Murray
  
  Was it mandatory to have the humour removal operation when you became a LibreOffice user?
  
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  1. Tuesday 13th September 2011 21:45 GMT Random Handle
    
    @Dave..
    
    .....no, but its in the recommended user specification.
    
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2. Tuesday 13th September 2011 10:26 GMT James Hughes 1
  
  @mhenriday
  
  Not sure why anyone would downvote your post. Have a thumbs up from me.
  
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  1. Tuesday 13th September 2011 13:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    @James
    
    No idea why anyone would downvote your reaction to the downvoting of the post. Here have a thumbs up from me.
    
    (sorry, can't resist this one) :-)
    
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3. Tuesday 13th September 2011 11:18 GMT Robert Carnegie
  
  Good point, only -five- years in beta
  
  But what about Google Labs stuff? Experimental add-ons that, now that Google Labs is -gone-, will -never- not be beta. I'll mention also Google Wave, which was not so much released as dumped into the open sourhce world with still nobody being quite sure what it was ever for.
  
  So, is "ten years" a ridiculous exaggeration? Not so much as five years is a ridiculous length of time for a service to beta. And, no, I haven't forgotten Napster. Or any number of open-source tools whose version number is less than 1.0 and, by the look of it, always will be - partimage for instance becoming obsolete when hard disks are all large enough to require partitioning with GPT.
  
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Tuesday 13th September 2011 13:13 GMT mhenriday

But Robert, if, as you say - and I agree - that

«five years is a ridiculous length of time for a service to beta» (nice use of the «beta as a verb !), would it not then have sufficed to say, «five years» rather than ten ? As noted above, to the general public, Gmail was in beta for two years, which, if the term beta is understood according to its received usage in the software release cycle - i e, feature-complete software which, with their permission, employs users as guinea pigs to test usability - is also, according to my lights, far too long. It should be noted that under the whole of this period, new features were being added to and updates released for Gmail, which made the term «beta» anomalous in the first place....

Dave, if your sense of humour is such that substituting «ten years» for «five years» tickles your funny bone, than I can reassure you - you may indeed use LibreOffice without submitting to an entirely superfluous humour-removal operation....

Henri

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Tuesday 13th September 2011 13:19 GMT Ian Johnston

What's the point?

LibreOffice is bound to collapse as OpenOffice bounces back.

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1. Tuesday 13th September 2011 23:37 GMT Tomato42
  
  what bounces back?
  
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Tuesday 13th September 2011 21:42 GMT Will Godfrey

@Ian Johnston

I don't recommend you placing a wager on that!

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