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El Reg has published an article that suggests, at least according to one person in the LibreOffice community, that OpenOffice development is essentially moribund and Apache should abandon it.
Christian Schaller, a Red Hat Software Engineering Manager and GNOME developer, wrote an open letter to Apache saying that "the OpenOffice project is all but dead upstream since IBM pulled their developers off the project almost a year ago and has significantly fallen behind feature wise... I hope that now that it is clear that this effort has failed that you would be willing to re-direct people who go to the openoffice.org website to the LibreOffice website instead."
A member of the Apache OpenOffice team was quick to respond: "We think Apache OpenOffice as released has been a huge success," he said. "Most of us don't really like the direction LibreOffice is heading to."
That said, the most recent OpenOffice update, version 4.1.1, was published nearly a year ago, and while the source code repository does show recent activity, it is much less than that for LibreOffice, as a quick browse of GitHub stats will confirm.
Other coverage can be found here.
I use LibreOffice when I'm in Linux and OpenOffice when I'm in MacOS X. Personally, I prefer them both to MS Office, although I do have MS Office on the Mac only because the people I work with don't use anything else. Are there any Soylentils here beside myself who use either one of these free products?
Note by Subsentient: Changed title from "Wither OpenOffice?"
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday August 21 2015, @07:17AM
*Pfffft*hahaHAW. From a link:
This could be a good discussion about why the many numerous distros and forks of everything *Nix-like is a good thing, but screw it -- why don't we all laugh at how much MS Office curb-stomps the competition, including both your precious Vi and EMACS?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VortexCortex on Friday August 21 2015, @08:14AM
laugh at how much MS Office curb-stomps the competition, including both your precious Vi and EMACS?
Well, unless you're editing code... or doing typesetting. Honestly, I just write documents in HTML. That's the real "universal" document format of today, everyone else is deluding themselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @01:56PM
".... That's the real "universal" document format of today, "
Actually, ASCIIDOC is the way to go.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @08:16AM
Competition is generally held as a good thing. It provides a good incentive to make products better and better, to always be better than the competition. There used to be a large group of people that thought differently, that everybody should be happy to drive a Lada. The only way they could keep that up, was by preventing people from seeing what people in countries with competition got to choose from. As soon as that failed, they were history.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @08:46AM
Really? I thought their economy collapsed after those stupid commies wasted their treasury on pointless wars in the middle east, which is exactly those stupid capitalists are doing right now. How many decades of unproductive war can capitalism sustain before total failure? Well let's see.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday August 21 2015, @01:58PM
Some people are actually making money on the venture.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:12AM
"Use up resources and energy to build complicated devices, and then take them out to the desert and blow them up."
That is a net loss strategy for the society.
Even if some people get rich on some of the various transactions. it just means that others lost even more.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:04PM
Don't worry, i never said it was a good thing. But it wasn't a total failure for everyone.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @06:24PM
Competition is good if there are enough resources to maintain the competition. Once enough forks have formed so that there's only one programmer per fork, competition is nonexistent. This is exactly what TFA is about - the Open Office project has run out of steam and is no longer competitive.
Sometimes, if you want to win a competition, you have to team up and form alliances. This is anathema to some whiny, cranky FOSS programmers who want to fork a project whenever their pet peeve is not attended to. If there weren't a gazzillion Linux distributions, maybe there would be a significant Linux Desktop penetration in the world.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Friday August 21 2015, @04:36PM
Microsoft Office is beating the hell out of the rest because it's so often mandatory. I much prefer Open Office Write to Microsoft's word processor, but magazines only take submissions in Microsoft Word format. And I absolutely HATE that word processor, getting away from it was one reason I was so happy to retire. Now that I'm going to submit stories to magazines, once again it's mandatory. (Excel is the best spreadsheet, even with that awful ribbon interface, but the ribbon isn't the worst thing about Word)
As to "die, open office," it's the usual flamebait from The Register. The last time I tried Libre Office it didn't have full justification, which is absolutely necessary for me, since I publish my books straight out a PDF made by the Open Office file.
It's installed on my computer, does well what I need it to do, it's going to take a very big reason for me to switch to anything else. I'll still write the stories in Oo, then copy and paste to Word.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday August 21 2015, @06:57PM
What I want to know is, what exactly makes you hate Word?
I have used all three, OpenOffice, LibreOffice and MS Office. When MS rolled out Office 2010 everyone threw a shit fit because of the ribbon interface. I use MS Office at work. I have no choice so I got used to it. You know what? I find the ribbon interface to be much more intuitive and easier to use. Going back to the other offices feels clumsy. Tabbed menus instead of toolbars provides you with a clean interface.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @10:33PM
Do you remember when the Ribbon was the way of the future, and soon everybody would be changing their interfaces to that style?
Didn't happen, did it?
The Ribbon isn't nearly as incredible as people think. I won't use Microsoft Office because of it being there.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Saturday August 22 2015, @03:06PM
Yes, I know quite a few people who like the ribbon, I hate it. I liked Word 97, I can't FIND anything in Word, like how to shut off "smart quotes". When I can find a control it takes forever. Microsoft makes it worse by naming everything unconventionally. Why is the hell did they rename "edit" to "home?" That's just brain-dead stupid. It's like Microsoft wants all their software to be as complicated (not complex, deliberately complicated) to use as possible while taking away user control.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Saturday August 22 2015, @11:57PM
> what exactly makes you hate Word?
1. It is a product of Microsoft, a company which has done me personally far more harm over my lifespan than terrorists have. Multiply that by millions of customers and...
2. It is a product of Microsoft, which guarantees it will fail frequently, randomly, and usually spectacularly.
3. It is a product of Microsoft, which means they will try to force me to upgrade and relearn every couple years.
4. That damned ribbon, which occupies way too much screen space, and hides capabilities, resulting in wasted hours hunting for stuff that used to be right there, easy to find.
5. When it craps on my document -- and it will -- it will just say "oh well, I guess you're hosed again sucker". Open/Libre Office however will frequently save the day in these situations.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @07:53PM
The last time I tried Libre Office it didn't have full justification, which is absolutely necessary for me, since I publish my books straight out a PDF made by the Open Office file.
That seems a little hard to believe, that is such a basic feature for a word processor that I would have expected it to always be there. Do you remember which version? I checked my netbook which has 4.0.6.2 installed on it and "full justification" is there in plain view. If you can provide a specific version, I'd like to check, but obviously I'm not going to check all the versions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @08:36PM
Without specifying A VERSION NUMBER, that isn't calling out an actual format.
This paradigm ONLY WORKS IF YOU STAY ON THE M$ TREADMILL and constantly pay M$ their filthy lucre.
Try sending your "M$-standard" document to someone who doesn't use THE SAME VERSION and you are headed for problems.
...and it gives me great pleasure each time this topic arises to mention that the solution to a "M$-standard" document that won't open with M$'s own app is to open that with LibreOffice.
Never seen it fail.
At that point it is anticlimatic to take the recovered document back to M$'s app--but some folks don't comprehend irony.
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @10:38PM
magazines only take submissions in Microsoft Word format
File -> Save As... -> File Type -> .doc
The last time I tried Libre Office it didn't have full justification
Format -> Alignment -> Justified