The French government has also thrown its support behind the LibreOffice project
Lol - I wonder why?
The Document Foundation, which is developing the LibreOffice software suite, has demonstrated the business software working entirely in the browser for cloud applications, and has announced that it will also port it to Android and iOS. The LibreOffice Online cloud software is built around HTML5 Canvas and the GTK+ framework …
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.
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
I am a person who uses LibreOffice (LO) almost everyday.
LO coming on tablets soon, so versatile!
Try out the extensions available with LO. It makes LO even more useful. Here are some very good extensions for LO:
http://www.languagetool.org/
- helps detect some grammar mistakes
-Requires Java 6.0 or later.
For Ubuntu (Linux) users I recommend they download libreoffice-java-common from the Ubuntu Software Center.
http://code.google.com/p/ooo2gd/downloads/detail?name=ooo2gd_3.0.0.oxt&can=2&q=
that lets you quickly & easily upload to Google Docs
I also recommend The complete Writer Guide:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/cgi_img_auth.php/b/ba/0200WG3-WriterGuide.pdf
and http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation
& Getting Started guide (full book) http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/cgi_img_auth.php/c/c4/0100GS3-GettingStartedLibO.pdf