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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: 5, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Friday August 21 2015, @07:25AM
I never understood why you just HAVE to keep adding crap, if it does the job they want it to and isn't being hit with security threats what is wrong with leaving it alone?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @08:50AM
it's not crap - it seems the majority of LibreOffice changes are things that make the code more efficient, improve importing and exporting third party file formats (I'm looking at you, MSOffice), and making the UI more sane
(Score: 2) by SuperCharlie on Friday August 21 2015, @11:01AM
I have said this for forever. The only reason in corpworld is to keep milking users and in the FOSS world, to keep up with corpworld it seems.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @12:11PM
The current OpenOffice does have open security issues. Their advice is to delete one of the DLL files, see https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html [openoffice.org] vs https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/security/advisories/cve-2015-1774/ [libreoffice.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:20AM
Uhhh...did anybody actually bother to READ the links to this "vulnerability" the AC was talking about? Its a bug in a file designed to support mid 90s South Korean proprietary office files from a program I bet none of you have ever heard of. the Apache Office simply gets rid of the file because common sense dictates that the vast majority aren't handling SK proprietary office files from the mid 90s, the LO bunch wastes time patching so they can continue to say they support mid 90s proprietary SK office files.....uhh yay?
Considering I've been working PC shops since Bill Shatner sold VIC 20s with his TJ Hooker rug and have NEVER run into this format? I have a feeling the odds of you actually running into one of these in the wild? Pretty damned small unless you work in a SK office with a lot of really REALLY old docs backed up on a server somewhere, so I really see no problem with the Apache guys saying "just toss it" as I seriously doubt anybody is gonna be going out and downloading infected .hwp files. Hell can anybody here even point to an example we can analyze?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @07:50AM
Note, that AOO did not simply get rid of the import filter, they tell the user to delete it manually. It will be removed from the next release, but I would not put money on that happening this year. So if you have not fixed this your self and I can get a file somewhere you might open it, then you are at risk.
Most OO/LO users will never need half of the import filters, or mail merge, or multiple language support, or conditional formatting, or a thousand other things. So they should just be dropped. No, if you want to cater for 100 million people, then you need to offer features that will only be used by 1 in a million of the users.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday August 21 2015, @07:32PM
I never understood why you just HAVE to keep adding crap, if it does the job they want it to and isn't being hit with security threats what is wrong with leaving it alone?
Exactly this! I think the issue is MS keeps changing office so the FOSS competitors feel they must keep up, even though the changes are often not for the better. It is one thing to keep tuning code to eliminate bugs and generally make things more efficient, it is another to make large changes just for the sake of appearances. I dread the day when the ribbon comes to Libre Office.
(Score: 1) by dvader on Saturday August 22 2015, @11:18AM
Good point. This is not new tech. After 20-30 years of use we know pretty well what features we want from an office suite. (Actually, I just care about spreadsheets. Latex, markdown, wikis etc has replaced almost all my needs of a word processor)
The only feature I'm missing and which is missing from all suites is plug-in-ability. I usually want to REMOVE features, not add. I don't want autocorrect, autocompletion or "autodetection of dates".
But most of all, PLEASE MAKE LOCALIZATION OPTIONAL! I want to use decimal point and ISO dates everywhere, regardless of which country the computer thinks I'm in. It is surprisingly difficult to accomplish in all office suites.
I want a bare minimum of features with everything else as optional plugins. Emacs got it right. The core is lean but you can add as many kitchen sinks as you like. Just get me a spreadsheet like that.