Open source suites go beyond Microsoft Office

In my blog post last week, as well as showing a cool video of Ubuntu for Android in action, I asserted that open source makes the perfect foundation for innovation. A sequence of news releases about open source desktop productivity suites have shown up over the last few weeks to add to the assertion. With this amount of energy, open source suites are looking more and more like interesting alternatives to Microsoft Office.

Calligra

Calligra is the continuation of what used to be the KOffice project. The group released Calligra Suite 2.4.1 at the end of April, confirming that version 2.4 is a fine step forward. It has the tools you’d expect: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, all with a fresh, clean, and appealing look.

But the tools you weren’t expecting — the visual database tool, the note taker, the vector graphics editor — add a sense of the innovation this project is intending. I was also interested to see a project management tool, as well as the introduction of a touch interface. The group has a commitment to the Open Document Format and is improving the quality of its ODF support.

With its roots in the K Desktop Environment (KDE), Calligra is only realistically available for GNU/Linux at present, but there’s an experimental Windows build and talk of a future Mac build. It’s available online.

LibreOffice

Keeping up its regular schedule, LibreOffice brought out release 3.5.3, further polishing the 3.5 line first introduced in February, which included a range of new features. LibreOffice comes standard with many of the extensions produced for OpenOffice.org, among them wiki editing, presentation support, and editable PDFs.

The project also announced details of the work planned by volunteers sponsored by Google’s Summer of Code initiative. They will be concentrating on collaboration tools, as well as tablet and Web versions of LibreOffice. The project offers versions for a wide range of platforms, including most editions of Windows, Mac, and GNU/Linux (where it’s usually bundled in the release or available via the package manager), plus various BSD Unix variants. It’s available for download.

LibreOffice’s host nonprofit, The Document Foundation (where I am a volunteer), also announced a new Certification scheme. I’ve not seen anything like this from an open source community before, but it promises to provide a fact-based metric to identify community members who can offer development, support, and training services for LibreOffice. This is a bold and innovative move that could be of immense benefit to commercial and government organizations deploying LibreOffice. The Certification Committee will be meeting for the first time in May at LinuxTag in Germany.

Apache OpenOffice (incubating)

You may recall about a year ago, Oracle switched the open source license to the OpenOffice.org copyrights it bought with Sun over to the Apache License and donated the trademark to Apache. Apache then started an “incubator podling” — a sandbox for a new community to form and prove itself worthy of full Apache status. With IBM staff doing the majority of the heavy development work, the podling (where I am also a volunteer) has finally released an Apache-approved version of the 3.4 code Oracle froze back in 2010.

While it may not look much, with few new capabilities beyond what Oracle handed over, like a duck on a lake the serenity conceals a lot of paddling. All the code Oracle didn’t own, which would have been licensed in a way not permitted for Apache projects, has been ripped out and mostly replaced with alternatives; capabilities that relied on Oracle servers (like the update and extensions library functions) have been migrated; graphics have been changed. IBM’s Rob Weir announced the regroomed version 3.4 on Tuesday, and it’s available for download — although as Bruce Byfield hints, it’s probably the next release that will be worth evaluating.

It’s great to see such a vibrant and competitive marketplace for these free and open source tools. They all offer support for ODF, the only file format guaranteed to work on all mainstream office suites including Microsoft Office. In this same period of energetic development, Microsoft recently committed support for the latest ODF update, and it is becoming increasingly smart to specify as the exchange and archiving format for editable documents as a complement to PDF. It’s even possible to combine the two; LibreOffice lets you make PDF files that embed the ODF source for editing, optionally with a password. Let’s hope the energy and innovation continues into the future; we all win in such a market.

This article, “Open source suites go beyond Microsoft Office,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of the Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.