Hi :) I suspect that's it's mostly only the "Fresh" branch. LibreOffice has an extremely fast-paced development. Each new branch introduces tons of new functionality and deals with legacy problems. This is partly "catch up", partly recoding to reduce the wide number of different programming languages into just C(++?) and Python, partly increasing compatibility with constantly changing proprietary formats, partly dealing with revolutionary changes in IT and radically new ways of thinking.
"Sun" achieved a stability by preventing almost anyone from making any changes at all. This meant that although there were tons of problems these were all "known problems" that people knew to either work-around or accept. They seldom worked on bug-reports or fixed anything, apparently. With each change, even if it's 'just' patching some problem there is a potential for unexpected side-effects. OpenOffice has a tradition (thanks to Sun and Oracle) of not dealing with problems. So OO remains "stable" even in a wide-eyed-end-user type of way. LibreOffice marches fearlessly on, deals with issues, adds new stuff to the "Fresh" branch and then patches as many of the new problems as it can with subsequent releases in that branch even after it becomes the "Still" branch and a new "Fresh" branch has been released. So it really isn't any surprise that LO has issues that OpenOffice doesn't. The same is true the other way around too! Both still have some long-running issues, just as any long-running project has. Just as MS Office has. Some may never be resolved but it's more likely to be fixed some day in LibreOffice precisely because so much more work is going on and because of the faster pace of development. This all happened long ago too ... Back before TDF and LibreOffice, before Oracle, various companies such as Novell, SuSE, Redhat, Gnome, Debian, Canonical (Ubuntu) and many more got together and developed a project called Go-oo that added a ton of stuff to each new release of OO.o making it faster and with better compatibility. However this often left the original branding in place so that many people thought they were using OpenOffice.org as released by "Sun" when they were actually using Go-oo. This was the case with almost all Gnu&Linux distros. IBM created their own additions and changes, eschewing the Go-o changes and just doing it all their own way to create "IBM Lotus Symphony" to sell to corporate organisations and others. Some Mac people did their own thing to OO.o to create NeoOffice. So lots of people were a little unhappy with the stagnation of OpenOffice under Sun and created their own forks or bunch of additions/changes to the infrequent OO.o releases. When Oracle acquired Sun and refused to communicate with the community at all, apparently seized assets, bank accounts and funds (almost entirely raised by the community and meant for the community's usage) a small group of (imo) heroes (incl Charles Schulz, Sophie, Italo, Micheal Meeks (of Novell) and about 16 more) pushed through the plan that had been developed years earlier to break away and create an independent organisation purely for the OpenOfice.org office suite. Luckily, under Sun, some communities had created independent "local" community organisations. Famously one in Germany, one in France, one in Brasil and so on. This made it easier for those places to set-up events and respond to "local" situations faster - without needing to run and ask "Sun" if every 'little' thing was ok with them. The Brazilian one had added some of their own coding making BrOO, yet another fork(ish?). Mostly these properly registered independent organisations were able to hang onto their own assets. The German one had enough funds, and enough expertise, to lend "The Document Foundation" enough funds to "start-up" as a "new" charity/business/organisation - and to give outsiders confidence in the legitimacy and future prospects of the new charity/business/organisation. Presumably that has long since been repaid or become irrelevant and TDF has shown that it is excellently well managed and gained a strong reputation in it's own right! Oracle kept the name and the branding so the newly formed "The Document Foundation" had to develop something new, even if it seemed like it would only be temporary and that Oracle would do the sensible thing and just give the name and branding back to the community. Some people stayed with OO.o, even under Oracle, and went through a ton of hardships there. The press and media blew it up as a fight between them and us when really it was still one community with 2 slightly diverging office suites and 2 different organisations "in charge". Go-oo quickly (well, in under a year) merged their changes into the main branch. Almost everyone in Go-oo was already heavily involved in LibreOffice anyway. For a year or so afterwards their website carried a really sweet and somewhat triumphant message saying that they had closed down and gone to TDF and LibreOffice. It's gone now but the domain is still hosted somewhere. Almost all Gnu&Linux distros switched to having LibreOffice as the default office suite quite quickly, even many that had previously used KOffice (which also forked at around that time) as their default office suite. I think NeoOffice and BrOffice also merged back into main-branch of LibreOffice too along with other less-well-known forks and extra projects although i've not kept track of what they have been doing. Oracle attempted to claim their OpenOffice was the superior by suddenly working frantically towards a new release, which they numbered just slightly higher than LibreOffice's numbers at the time but by then they had already lost the impetus and their paid devs weren't familiar with the OO.o code-base so their 'new' version didn't have anything like as much polish or new features. TDF responded to the challenge by simply re-numbering the releases they were already working on at the time and swept in some new features they had been going to leave for the next "Fresh" branch. So TDF got their version out days earlier than Oracle and with it looking much better too according to all the reviews at the time. By the time Oracle released their 3.4 (or was it 5?).0 a few days later it was tooo late and unimpressive so few, if any, articles appeared about it - except to compare it against the LO one that 'everyone' had already been using. Oracle finally seemed to wake up to the fact they weren't going to be able to compete and weren't going to be able to split the program/suite up in order to make an "enterprise" or "professional" version to profit from. They seemed to see it as a "mill-stone around their neck". At the time they were in court fighting against Apache. IBM allegedly managed to convince them to 'give' OpenOffice away. Better a millstone around an opponents neck than around your own when you are trying to fight someone, right? Since then OpenOffice has really flown. Their community, along with some new people from Apache, have done some amazing good work. With their new owner just letting them "get on with it", rather than constantly fighting against them, made a huge difference! It then became much easier for people to be in both communities and to some extent share work across both projects. Sadly by then so much development had already gone into LibreOffice that the two projects really had diverged from each other so sharing code is often not possible any more - but that hasn't stopped people working in both or sharing ideas across both or just helping each other personally. IBM eventually 'gave' "Lotus Symphony" to Apache OpenOffice so they could merge. Hagar helped me with one of our wiki-pages by basically letting me just copy&paste one of his help-pages from their forum - and helped me with some of the changes it needed too. The head of the LO Documentation Team spent a lot of time heading up their Documentation Team too. All across the projects there are people working together quietly. So throughout the history of this forking and so-called fragmentation it's actually been a case of merging and consolidation - with even the 2 main apparent 'rivals' working together to a much greater extent than outsiders would understand. Regards from Tom :) On 10 October 2015 at 14:27, Florian Reisinger <flo...@libreoffice.org> wrote: > Would you be so kind as to tell us which aspects got worse? > > Am 10. Oktober 2015 15:26:08 MESZ, schrieb "Andreas Säger" < > ville...@t-online.de>: > >Am 10.10.2015 um 15:23 schrieb Philip Jackson: > >> > >> Thank you Tom for that interesting explanation of the documentation > >website. > >> > >> It explains why I often have trouble finding answers there. I keep a > >local copy > >> of "OpenOffice.org 3 Writer Guide" on my machine and can often find > >answers > >> there faster than on the website. > >> > >> Philip > >> > > > >LO introduces far too many changes to the worse which is why I still > >prefer OpenOffice. > > > > > >-- > >To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org > >Problems? > >http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ > >Posting guidelines + more: > >http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette > >List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ > >All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be > >deleted > > -- > Diese Nachricht wurde von meinem Android-Mobiltelefon mit K-9 Mail > gesendet. > -- > To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org > Problems? > http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ > Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette > List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ > All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be > deleted > -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted