Community outcry over the removal of the Openffice office suite in Ubuntu Netbook Edition has forced a rethink by its developers.
Again, ahem.
Earlier this week, we reported that AbiWord and GNUMeric would be added to cater to office and productivity needs in Ubuntu’s official spin for small form factor laptops.
Now the decision has been fully reversed: OpenOffice will continue to be installed by default in the upcoming Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04 LTS.
Rick Spencer, the dev responsible for the decision, shared the following statement on the Ubuntu netbook software selection whiteboard:
All in all it seems that users and community members would really prefer that we ship OOo for the editing suite. We discussed a bit in [the Ubuntu desktop IRC] this morning and decided that we should probably switch back to OOo, which we will do on Monday if we don’t hear anything that makes us change our minds again.
Good decision?
I think so. Many of those using Ubuntu on netbooks are open-source fans. OpenOffice is the most widely used and most widely compatible offline office suite. It makes sense to include it so users can create and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations in common formats.