LibreOffice Code Quality

Simon Phipps has written an article for InfoWorld about the latest code defect review of LibreOffice by Coverity.

Coverity has tools to check computer program code for many faults. These tools are offered commercially (and thus used by vendors of proprietary software) but they are also specifically made available for Open Source projects. Every once in a while a report is published on this effort, and that is most useful.

As it turns out, LibreOffice has vastly improved the code quality since it started its path about 4 years ago, now featuring one of the lowest fault rates of any large program/suite. OpenOffice, the codebase from which it started, had many features but also plenty of bugs. The LibreOffice project has clearly taken that lesson and done its homework. Naturally, being an open source project, it’s not just one small group of people at one organisation working on this, but many people globally.

As Simon writes:

While an open source license on code is no automatic guarantee of quality, by its nature it allows evaluation of quality and encourages collaborative efforts toward improvement.

LibreOffice is not Microsoft Office. It uses a different approach in many aspects of its user interface. But, by and large, provides very similar functionality. It’s probably safe to say that the user interface differences between LbreOffice and MSOffice are smaller than the differences between two MSOffice versions. Each takes some getting used to, but it’s often not a drama.

And LibreOffice can read and write MS Office documents. I prefer LibreOffice, because using it does not require either me or anyone else to buy licenses for a particular version of a particular product – because we do know that nasty things often happen when opening a document, spreadsheet or presentation on a different version.

For education, it is very important to have open formats and free tools available – it enables everybody to access the technology. Not just at schools, but also in the home and beyond. Documents get shared, so it’s all tied together.

LibreOffice is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux – you can download it from http://www.libreoffice.org/ although if you run Linux it’s probably already installed and you may just have been using it as your regular office suite already!