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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: 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.