Shaken-Not-Stirred Technology Mixed Right!

From time to time old hardware comes my way. Often this is hardware that clients are done with after an upgrade cycle. Most of the time this hardware still has plenty of life in it for home use by the average home user.

When this is the case I try to recycle the hardware either for my own use, or for use by family or friends. Last week an Intel Mac from 2008 with Mac OS-X 10.6 crossed my path. After a quick reset of the admin account password and a clean out of the old accounts/files I was ready to install all the standard tools and toys, including the excellent LibreOffice suite. Much to my dismay the current version of LibreOffice does not support any version of Mac OS-X before 10.8 (I have no idea what animal or geographic location that is). After much searching I stumbled across this link:

https://downloadarchive.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/old/

which provided the older version I was in search of. While I understand the LibreOffice developers wanting everyone that can to upgrade to the latest and greatest there are many perfectly good computers that can not upgrade to the latest OS release for any number of reasons. The users of these computers should also have easy access to Free Software and it should not be hidden from them. I urge all developers of Free Software, not just The Document Foundation, to make it easy to find older versions of their software. This will benefit end users, the environment (fewer computers destroyed and burried), and the Free Software movement in general.

Hopefully this posting will help others find old versions of LibreOffice faster than I was able.