OpenOffice now LibreOffice

Zix

Don't know how this impacts Zotero. It's probably good from a developer's perspective as it frees the software from Oracle (previously Sun).

http://www.documentfoundation.org/

bdarcus

First I'd heard of it, but it should be a good thing. There were already strains between OOo and Sun, and Oracle really couldn't seem to care less about free software. Something for the Zotero developers to definitely keep up on to make sure the plug-in is compatible.

yosttheskanker

Interestingly enough, I think Zotero will be the only thing that would keep me with OpenOffice instead of LibreOffice. I <3 this and super hope Zotero works well with LibreOffice. I kinda wish i could code to help this happen.

Zix

Interesting commentary here:
http://gigaom.com/2010/09/28/libreoffice-an-idea-whose-time-has-come-and-gone/

Let's hope the new freedom allows them to innovate.

Jon Rubin

Blah - typical web2.0 nonesense. Try telling the academic world that documents aren't something they look at!
Having said that, if they manage to get a proper docx filter and handling as a result of this, then I will be cheering libreoffice on.
Development let alone innovation has been pretty slow - I had a look at what is happening to writer in 3.3 and the short answer is not much. It's got google, novell and cannonical behind it, so hopefully it will flourish.

bdarcus

I get annoyed by the binary perspective of some of these arguments: web-oriented devs who don't get the needs of productivity documents, and the traditional desktop devs who don't get the web. But I absolutely loathe being on a committee where people still pass around Word attachments; certainly feels rather archaic.

As for OOo, there have been low-level innovations of late in OOo, ready for developers to build on. For example, they added a really cool new metadata API that is based on new metadata support I helped add to ODF. Zotero and bibliographic data was in fact a use case I explicitly included in the design documents (I largely wrote the use case document), so it would be nice if at some point a developer actually used it!

Zix

Well, here's some web 2.0 nonsense: http://www.docverse.com/. Looks cool to me in the way that Zotero was cool to someone who'd been stuck using something like Endnote for years. Given that Google now owns DocVerse and is a supporter of LibreOffice, let's hope they bring this functionality to LibreOffice as well as Office.

unhammer

Since several major GNU/Linux distributions are going to switch to LibreOffice, I do hope it gets Zotero support.

Also, seeing as Oracle owns what used to be Sun Java, openjdk support seems more pressing than ever... (of course, a C++ port would be best... but I guess since java was chosen there had to be very good reasons)

DWL-SDCA

Consider how Oracle has been dragging its feet in fixing OOo on the Mac. A recent OS upgrade changed the path structure to Java and some (even much) of OOo has been broken for more than two weeks. Apple announced the planned structural change months ago. NeoOffice and LibreOffice both addressed this problem immediately (or even anticipated the problem so that there wasn't any interval with a loss of functionality). I have used OOo for years but it is clear that it isn't as well-supported since Oracle bought Sun. I am in the middle of a project that is on hold until the Java/Mac issue is solved. The Oracle developers say that they have a fix in the works but there is no word on when it will be available as a program update. I think that I can use NeoOffice to finish the work but that is another story.

I would be interested in keeping up with any plans to integrate Zotero with OOo-based alternatives like NeoOffice and LibreOffice.

Simon

The Zotero OpenOffice Integration plug-in has always worked with NeoOffice, and the latest version should work with LibreOffice as well, although for me the latest LibreOffice release is still broken due to the Java update. NeoOffice works.

jihyao

Libreoffice beta 3 is ok now on mac..