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OpenOffice may not last much longer as many of its former developers have jumped ship to LibreOffice:
OpenOffice, once the premier open source alternative to Microsoft Office, could be shut down because there aren't enough developers to update the office suite. Project leaders are particularly worried about their ability to fix security problems.
An e-mail thread titled, "What would OpenOffice retirement involve?" was started yesterday by Dennis Hamilton, vice president of Apache OpenOffice, a volunteer position that reports to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) board. "It is my considered opinion that there is no ready supply of developers who have the capacity, capability, and will to supplement the roughly half-dozen volunteers holding the project together," Hamilton wrote.
No decisions have been made yet, but Hamilton noted that "retirement of the project is a serious possibility," as the Apache board "wants to know what the project's considerations are with respect to retirement."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @04:13PM
Microsoft is very good at the more tedious aspects of UX. They sit users in front of a PC and have someone ask them to open one of their products and try to perform a certain task, and that person will be watched through a one-way mirror with researchers taking notes.
Another thing MS has lots of money for is testing - extensive testing including both automatic and manual, not just unit tests and mini-tests for feature coverage. They don't say "anyone can download the source and submit a patch", they pay employees to fix them, and MS Office is well staffed because it makes a lot of money.
OTOH Open Office is a "good enough" product. Even before Oracle, nobody cared that much about it, and really good engineers won't sign up to work on it because it's sustaining work by definition.