[Libreoffice-qa] Question of the use of 'Fresh' rather than 'Beta' and support for XP

[Jay Philips]

Hi All,

I was curious why the word "Fresh" is used rather than the more widely 
used word "Beta" for the latest development release branch. This was a 
confusing thing to me as well until I read "Fresh, targeted to early 
adopters and technology enthusiasts, and Stable targeted to enterprise 
deployments and conservative users” at 
<http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2014/04/29/the-document-foundation-announces-libreoffice-4-1-6/ 
 >. Chromium,Firefox and the like use theword "Beta" for development 
branches and users testing and reviewing LibO would understand it as 
such, so that negative compatibility reviews don't show up similar to 
the review that brought me into testing LibO < 
http://netrunner-mag.com/libreoffice-vs-microsoft-office-part-deux/ >.

With the recent talk about 4.3 not working on windows XP, i was 
wondering how long XP will be supported by LibO as chrome, firefox, and 
opera have stated that they will continue to support XP as long as it is 
popular among their users. As a recent ex-windows XP user, i believe 
many users will stick with XP for another half decade or more and i 
think that supporting these users with a modern open source office suite 
as an alternative to the last version of ms office that will run on XP 
and Vista (office 2010) would be a great advantage to bringing in more 
users to LibO, especially as LibO continues to improve in compatibility 
and features. Microsoft will continue to support office 2007 for another 
3 years and office 2010 for another 7 < 
http://www.allyncs.com/docs/lifecyclesupport.html >.

-- 
Jay Philips