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OpenOffice may not last much longer as many of its former developers have jumped ship to LibreOffice:
OpenOffice, once the premier open source alternative to Microsoft Office, could be shut down because there aren't enough developers to update the office suite. Project leaders are particularly worried about their ability to fix security problems.
An e-mail thread titled, "What would OpenOffice retirement involve?" was started yesterday by Dennis Hamilton, vice president of Apache OpenOffice, a volunteer position that reports to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) board. "It is my considered opinion that there is no ready supply of developers who have the capacity, capability, and will to supplement the roughly half-dozen volunteers holding the project together," Hamilton wrote.
No decisions have been made yet, but Hamilton noted that "retirement of the project is a serious possibility," as the Apache board "wants to know what the project's considerations are with respect to retirement."
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 03 2016, @02:39AM
Over the years, we've seen a lot of duplication, in research, engineering, coding, etc. Marketing too, I guess.
Microsoft is responsible for shutting down a lot of good office suites - my all-time favorite was Word Perfect. Cumulatively, the world lost a lot of good ideas, as a result. Real competition is a good thing, after all.
But, in this case, I can't see real competition. LO and OO started with the same code, and set off on similar development paths. Sure, they've diverged over time, but basically, they're still the same office suites. The fork was political, rather than technical.
The OO people ought to move over to LO, and maybe put the brakes on some of the bloat mentioned in earlier posts. Not necessarily stop all bloat, but just apply some braking power to the problem.
Of course, since it WAS a politically motivated fork, the OO people may not be welcome at LO?
Anyway, this whole story is just one more reason to dislike Oracle, aka, The New SCO.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @03:11AM
I never really did understand the difference between LO and AOO and OOo and what other forks there are. I've heard that it is the pace of development, features and politics but that became even more confused as I've never really saw a delineation of said differences. Plus, LibreOffice has two branches, fresh and still, which are not the same in terms of development pace and features.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the market itself is confused and, with most people on Microsoft, there doesn't seem to be motivation to fix it. Someone somewhere that knows what is going on in either project needs to come up with some sort of real marketing plan as to what makes them better/different than the competitors, including other forks.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Saturday September 03 2016, @03:41AM
As for the Bloat, I haven't seen it, so it must not affect many people. LO works on evening I have, from my quad core desktop to this Raspberry Pi V3 I'm typing on at the moment.
There are a few things that are just the dickens to find in LO without resorting to a google search., but otherwise its handled everything I threw at it. People always predict the end of the world if you open an Excell spreadsheet with LO, but that has not been my experience. In fact Excell is as likely to screw up your excell spreadsheet as is anything else.
But there is probably no point in the OO hold outs joining LO. My impression is that LO is so far ahead of those guys left at Mozilla that they would be useless, and probably bitch-slapped into menial tasks anyway.
You say it was political, but I do believe there were important issues at stake. Mozilla isn't making very many people happy with any of their products these days.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @08:10AM
That said Apache has turned from a highly focused team pushing the boundaries of web development into the place corporations send their formerly commercial/badly open sourced code to die.
How many of apache's projects are still in the incubator and not the attic anymore? Harmony 5 and 6 were only 10-15 percent away from FULL standards compliance when apache abandoned them and google took up the slack to turn them into the android codebase, where their standardization seperated further without ever reaching jdk 5/6 compatibility :(
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday September 04 2016, @02:45AM
Yet LibreOffice won't run on my 2 core X86 due to it using the 5th(?) most popular X86 OS. OpenOffice meanwhile kept its StarOffice roots and runs fine.
BTW, why do you mention Mozilla? As far as I know they have nothing to do with any office suite besides having a browser that can access the cloud.