Advantages of LibreOffice Technology
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:39
LibreOffice technology is the best platform for development of open source personal productivity software.
00:50
We will look at how, over 10 years, the LibreOffice community has managed to transform the open office source code,
01:01
which was a desktop product, into a development platform available on multiple technologies and multiple operating systems. In 2010, the LibreOffice community, which was at the time part of the open office community,
01:34
took control of the open office software that was under risk of being abandoned by Oracle.
01:44
The reality is that it was not just abandoned by Oracle in 2010, but was then abandoned by IBM in 2014, after three years of a failing project trying to relaunch OpenOffice as Apache OpenOffice without developers and without community.
02:13
So today, LibreOffice is by far the most known and the largest used open source office suite.
02:30
And we'll see how, over the 10 years, this activity has transformed the desktop product into a platform.
02:42
Since 2010, the different LibreOffice families have gone through a number of development cycles, and each cycle was focused on a specific area, although developers, of course, were taking care of the entire source code
03:08
and the entire issues and problems and challenges. Let's say that each family had a focus, and the progress of these focuses, starting from code cleaning,
03:24
going through code refactoring, going through an update of the user interface, which made it possible to guarantee availability on multiple platforms, which includes mobile and cloud, of course,
03:41
and allows to have an improved document compatibility today. I would say an extremely good document compatibility with Microsoft Office proprietary formats. All this, over 10 years, has allowed to develop different products in different flavors.
04:12
All the products which are from different organizations share the same engine, and this engine is common to all LibreOffice modules.
04:23
We call this LibreOffice technology. We have a logo for LibreOffice technology, and we will be investing quite a lot in terms of efforts, marketing efforts, to make the concept of LibreOffice technology more popular and more widely known in the community of Office Suite users.
04:52
LibreOffice technology, as I said, is the result of 10 years of development. There is a single processing engine common to all modules.
05:05
The processing engine is based on a clean and refactored source code, with a strong focus on code quality and consistency, and all this is supported by easy and extensive APIs. This provides the best open source platform for personal productivity,
05:24
which is tightly integrated on desktop, mobile, and cloud. This image shows you this integration. There is a common productivity engine and a common format,
05:41
but the format could also be Microsoft Office proprietary format. What is important is that the approach of the common productivity engine allows to have a strong consistency up to the file. The differences are in the user interface, which of course is specific for each module, for each application,
06:11
and is also specific for each platform. This is completely different from what happens with a proprietary and OpenCore Office Suite,
06:24
where developers, as they were missing a strong engine, as in LibreOffice, a strong engine capable of handling the productivity challenges from a single source,
06:49
have been forced to develop different engines for different platforms and for different applications. So you have a different word processing engine for desktop, mobile, and cloud,
07:03
a different spreadsheet engine for desktop, mobile, and cloud, and a different presentation software engine for desktop, mobile, and cloud. This means that there is less consistency amongst documents,
07:22
because the documents have been generated, although based on the same concept, but have been generated by different engines, and of course at the end you have a different user interface because the platforms are different. But while the user interface differences in user interface are acceptable,
07:43
what is a problem for users are the differences in engines and documents that turn out in potential issues for users.
08:01
We should also underline the importance of the localization effort for LibreOffice. LibreOffice is the application available in more native language versions than any other one available, either proprietary or open source. We ship around 120 language versions and we have more under development.
08:28
Also, during the years, the developers have been able and have managed to create a user interface that makes it easy for users that were not familiar
08:44
or were used to the Microsoft Office fluid interface, known also as the ribbon, to have something which is similar in look and feel.
09:02
Of course, it's similar in look and feel, but it's different because it's based on the different characteristics of LibreOffice, not different characteristics in terms of features, because LibreOffice shares with Microsoft Office the majority of features,
09:22
but the different characteristic, as I said, of the common engine for all the application. So we have a notebook bar, a notebook bar compact, a group bar compact. These different options provide a lot of flexibility to users.
09:44
Developers at LibreOffice can rely on a complete development infrastructure, which is hosted by the Document Foundation and provides all the tools that are necessary for the development of the Office Suite.
10:05
In addition, developers use for quality also external tools like CovertiScan is a static code analysis tool. Over the years, developers, and here we should thank mostly Red Hat for coordinating and driving this effort,
10:30
have been able, as you see, to go from, to fix a large number of defect and to go to zero defect
10:43
and to maintain the level of zero defect basically since 2015 with a few hiccups in the case of new versions, but negligible amount of issues in comparison with the previous situation.
11:02
We also use fuzzing tools to spot vulnerabilities, and this is extremely useful to spot vulnerabilities before they hit the user, before they reach the user.
11:26
LibreOffice is using a standard document format called Open Document Format. It's the true document standard, and it offers freedom of choice. Why I say it's the true document standard?
11:41
Because the Microsoft Office proprietary formats have also been approved as document standards, even if they are not. They are not standard because they do not follow the ISO definition for standard and the ISO approach to open standard.
12:10
But I will talk about this in a specific presentation. Characteristics of ODF are that is simple, solid, robust, is consistent across operating systems, is based on many existing ISO standards.
12:33
So it doesn't reinvent the wheel, absolutely not. It's using standards when they are available, is predictable and consistent in terms of behavior versus content and format,
12:48
which means that if you create a document with LibreOffice on the desktop and LibreOffice on the cloud, the document will be exactly the same in terms of not only what you see on the screen, but in terms of code of the document.
13:10
And ODF as a format is human readable by normal users. If you look at the content of ODF, not what you see on the screen, but what the file contains,
13:26
you would be amazed how easy it is to spot the different components of a file. Of course, we cannot forget that there is a large number,
13:41
a very large number of users using a Microsoft proprietary document format. And because of this, we spend, developers spend a large amount of time to improve the situation, to manage what is called a round tree test.
14:02
So take a document developed with Microsoft Office, open it with LibreOffice, change it, and open it back with the Microsoft Office and the document has to be the same, and asked, of course, to include the changes applied by LibreOffice.
14:23
And this round tree test is continuously managed in the different flavors. Of course, it's managed for Word document, it's managed for Excel spreadsheet, and it's managed for PowerPoint slide decks.
14:42
This is key to remember that LibreOffice, one of the key features of LibreOffice, is the quality of the compatibility with Microsoft Office file. And this is a LibreOffice feature, but it's also a LibreOffice technology asset.
15:05
The quality of the filters included in the LibreOffice technology is available to all the products that are based on that technology. So the same quality is available on the desktop, on mobile, and on the cloud.
15:24
And if you save a document to Docx, it will be exactly the same, independently from the platform you are saving it from. And if you import, the behavior will be the same, also independently from the platform.
15:45
This is a huge advantage for users, because once they become a customer to LibreOffice, LibreOffice makes it very easy to predict the quality of the imported document,
16:00
and to solve the basic issues which are, in most of the cases, related to fonts or to other trivial problems, which can be solved just by changing a few elements in the configuration of the software or the file.
16:29
To support development, developers have created LibreOffice Kit. LibreOffice Kit allows to access LibreOffice functionalities
16:44
without the need to learn and use the UNO complexity. The idea was to offer a thin API that allowed people to create,
17:02
write small application without to dig into the complexity of the UNO API that is a lot more difficult to learn and needs more experience than LibreOffice Kit.
17:24
And also, LibreOffice Kit allows rendering of documents for any application. Another area where developers focus their efforts is the creation of macro libraries for LibreOffice,
17:42
which can be called using Basic or Python. And these libraries help to overcome the steep learning curve of LibreOffice API,
18:00
and offer easy access to several macro features that allow to create macros in an easier way, and also in a faster way, than by using the Star Basic language.
18:27
LibreOffice version. The LibreOffice technology, of course, allows to easily create different versions of the software, and the versions are also different based on the support which is associated with the version.
18:52
There are dailies, betas, and release candidates that are focused on testing the LibreOffice source code for quality,
19:03
and these are, we can say that are reserved to power users, people that are able to manage the software and knows the software to a level that is able to control the potential issues that happen when using an unstable version,
19:30
unstable by definition, because it's still a development version. Then we have a community version, which is a stable version.
19:42
The fact that we have added community is to underline the fact that this version is supported by community members, is supported by volunteers, and although these volunteers are extremely professionals in their support,
20:02
they cannot provide 24x7 support, they cannot work every day because they have another activity, they are volunteers. So this is the reason why there is a family of enterprise product, a family of enterprise product which are targeted to enterprises, targeted to large migrations and deployments.
20:29
These versions are offered with professional support, they might be long-term supported version or specific version based on an agreement with an ecosystem company.
20:43
It is important that enterprise users learn that the best way to deploy LibreOffice on their premises is to buy an enterprise version.
21:04
The cost is not even comparable with that of proprietary software, but by paying a small amount of money, they support the development of the product,
21:20
they support the development of the project, because being open source, whatever is developed paid by a single enterprise will soon become an asset for the entire ecosystem, for the community of users, for the community of individual and enterprise users.
21:48
Enterprises will pay for a feature, but then will benefit for features that have been developed by other paying users. So there is a common advantage in supporting LibreOffice enterprise version.
22:09
Which are the products available based on LibreOffice technology? There is a desktop version, there are long-term supported enterprise version,
22:22
there are online versions, mobile version for Android and iOS, a Mac version for the Apple store and a Windows version from the Windows store. All these products, as I said, are based on the LibreOffice technology, so they are not different from each other.
22:51
They are very similar in terms of approach, in terms of results. You can exchange documents between a desktop version provided by TDF
23:05
and a Windows store version provided by Allotropia, and an Android version provided by Collabora without any issue, because the file format is the same, and also the features are generated and provided by the same transactional engine.
23:29
So to summarize all this, the unique selling proposition of LibreOffice is to be the best open source office suite ever, backed by a strong community and a strong ecosystem.
23:44
Based on the Open Document Format ISO standard document for interoperability and digital sovereignty, which is important because ODF will allow you to have full control over your contents,
24:05
but also providing a superior compatibility with proprietary document format. So the best of free open source software with professional support available for organization using Office productivity for production and management of strategic business contents.
24:26
All this is important. I hope you have some questions. I'm available to answer your questions now. Thank you for listening and see you.
25:18
So I don't see questions from the chat, and if there are no questions, you can use the four minutes to get a good coffee.