LibreOffice 4.3 upgrades spreadsheets, brings 3D models to presentations | Ars Technica

"LibreOffice's latest release provides easier ways of working with spreadsheets and the ability to insert 3D models into presentations, along with dozens of other changes.

LibreOffice was created as a fork from OpenOffice in September 2010 because of concerns over Oracle's management of the open source project. LibreOffice has now had eight major releases and is powered by "thousands of volunteers and hundreds of developers," the Document Foundation, which was formed to oversee its development, said in an announcement today. (OpenOffice survived the Oracle turmoil by being transferred to the Apache Software Foundation and continues to be updated.)

In LibreOffice 4.3, spreadsheet program Calc "now allows the performing of several tasks more intuitively, thanks to the smarter highlighting of formulas in cells, the display of the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar, the ability to start editing a cell with the content of the cell above it, and being able to fully select text conversion models by the user," the Document Foundation said.

For LibreOffice Impress, the presentation application, users can now insert 3D models in the gITF format. "To use this feature, go to Insert ▸ Object ▸ 3D Model," the LibreOffice 4.3 release notes say. So far, this feature is available for Windows and Linux but not OS X."

From Ars Technica

Use the forks Luke!

Luke Skywalker: These chopsticks are driving me nuts!
Darth Vader: Use the forks Luke, use the forks.

A few big forks in the open source world: OpenOffice.org has become LibreOffice and Open Solaris has become Open Indiana. I've installed Libreoffice and have been quite impressed with it. For one thing, mail merges work perfectly (something I've always struggled with in Open Office) as well as a few other nice touches.
But perhaps the most interesting thing about these forks is that their presence reminds us that no large company can ever control an open source project. As soon as Oracle began putting noses out of joint over their handling of Sun's open source assets, the community just up and left, taking its goodwill with it. A cautionary tale for quite a few companies I would have thought.

So what software do you use?

We have 100 student desktop computers running Ubuntu 8.10. Each machine has the following software installed:

Office:

• Open Office
• Freemind
• Planner (Project Management)

Education:

• Stellarium
• GBrainy
• KSeg (Geometry sketchpad)
• Graphics:
• Blender 3D
• Gimp
• Inkspace
• Ocular
• Scribus

Video and Audio:

• Amarok
• Audacity
• Avidemux
• Recordmydesktop
• Kdenlive
• Kino
• Pitivi
• LMMS
• NtEd
• QSynth
• VLC
• Rosegarden
• Rhythmbox
• Frescobaldi

Programming:

• Gambas
• Bluefish
• Eclipse

Games:

• Alien Arena
• Battle for Wesnoth
• Flightgear
• Frets on Fire
• Nexuiz
• Torcs
• Warsow
• Glest

Open source up; locked in down

I was recently passed this really interesting survey Forrester Consulting has carried out. It found that 81% of enterprises have already deployed open source desktop/productivity software or are planning to with 12 months.
See the full report here.

Another report caught my eye, this one noting:

• More than 72 percent of those surveyed are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their adoption of Linux on the server in 2009, with more than 68 percent making the same claim for the desktop;
• The recession is forcing many IT buyers to re-evaluate purchasing strategies in order to save costs, with open source increasingly getting the nod. IDC found that the recession is driving even more adoption of Linux, and new Forrester data suggests that cost savings will help open source well beyond Linux."

See the full report here.

Return on Investment

Ohloh.com has a great calculator for assessing the investment made into open source projects. It takes a project and analyses its code, then works out how much it would cost to pay a developer (at $55,000k/yr) to produce an equivalent project. Some of the projects took even me by surprise: got a spare US$150m? You could commission an Office suite. If your fortunes have waned a little in the recessionary times and you only US$15m sitting round, you can buy yourself a graphic manipulation project similar to Photoshop. It makes Firefox seem like a bargain at only US$840,000!!
Some of my other favourite projects are listed below:

Open Office:

Gimp:

Moodle:

Koha:


However you look at it, these numbers are a ringing endorsement of the open source model. Individuals, groups and organisations contributing a few hours (or dollars) here and there can pull together teams that dwarf most software development companies, simply by harnessing the power of community. But the great thing is that for the end user, it's all free.