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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: 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.