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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: 3, Interesting) by FakeBeldin on Friday August 21 2015, @07:48AM
For work, we're using Blackboard Collaborate (an online presentation / classroom environment).
Uploading slides works from Ubuntu works with ... Apache OpenOffice.
LibreOffice? Nope. Installing them side by side is a hassle, but can be done.
(I first tried living only on AOO. 5 minutes into that I realised that it's uncomfortable for me in too many ways.)
I wish Blackboard Collaborate would support LibreOffice, but I don't think it's high on their agenda. Perhaps LO could start hooking into the AOO interface that Blackboard uses, but I wouldn't have any idea on where to start with that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @12:13PM
Did you file a bug? Maybe it would just be a small amount of work for LO to be made compatible. Maybe someone at the document foundation could have a work with someone at blackboard and make it happen.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday August 21 2015, @01:49PM
I talked with the folks at Blackboard support. The thing is: it requires a helper program.
They do this for Powerpoint using VBScript (I kid you not - solved a colleague's problem by installing vbruntime.exe). They also have something for AOO - I completely forgot what.
The problem is not with LibreOffice, but with Blackboard's lack of support. I did complain about that.
I could file an LO bug about this, but for me this is a problem of software of the big corporation with the expensive licenses, not of the free and open source office suite.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @10:33PM
...is the stuff of legend.
Trying to find something equally awful is a true challenge.
Have you contacted your local Moodle guru and asked if Moodle has this problem?
While you have his ear, you might ask for a presentation for TPTB.
Moodle is GPL'd, BTW.
-- gewg_