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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, Informative) by No Respect on Friday August 21 2015, @09:16AM
LibreOffice works well enough. Except for the database frontend. The devs should eliminate "Base" until they get it to the point where Java is no longer a prerequisite. That's my only real gripe with it and it's not a huge one since I wouldn't be using Base either way. Plenty of "free" database solutions for Linux without that monstrosity. The only other gripe I have, and it's somewhat minor as well, is Writer embeds a fuckton of stylesheets in documents that are a pain in the ass to deal with when the file is opened in MS Word.
Other than that I really like what LibreOffice does and, in one gig I had, saved the client a lot of money he didn't really want to spend on an overpriced subscription-based office productivity suite from the Evil Empire. He was happy with the results and that's all that counts.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by BananaPhone on Friday August 21 2015, @02:34PM
I don't have Java on ANY of my boxes.
No more Java worries and in the past 3 years, No web sites begging for it either.
I was curious about BASE but now I know not to bother.
(Score: 1) by massa on Friday August 21 2015, @04:20PM
My workplace (State Assembly) has 3000+ workstations, and uses LibreOffice almost exclusively. I use it on all three platforms (Linux, Mac, & Win). But you're right, Base sucks terribly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @05:18PM
LibreOffice Base, in itself, will always be limited when compared to other databases.
However, Java allows LibreOffice to seamlessly utilize other, more powerful, databases as a backend. For example, I use the Java inetrface to a MariaDB (MySQL) database. In this way, LibreOffice functions as a graphical front end to MariaDB (MySQL) and allows the creation of graphical forms, queries, and reports.
Base is limited, but Java opens up a much larger and more powerful database world. One would be a fool not to use it.
(Score: 2) by No Respect on Friday August 21 2015, @08:17PM
It does allow the use of other database backends, but then again so do any number of other db frontends, many of which do not require Java. If you're a regular Java developer then it's not much of a hindrance, but if it were written in, say, Python, it would attract a whole lot more people.