OpenOffice Is Now, Officially, Apache OpenOffice

rbowen writes "Apache OpenOffice has graduated from the Incubator, and now is officially a top-level project at the Apache Software Foundation." From the announcement: "As with all Apache software, Apache OpenOffice software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Information on Apache OpenOffice source code, documentation, mailing lists, related resources, and ways to participate are available at http://openoffice.apache.org." (Download mirror on Sourceforge, too.)

Comments

who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

we all moved to LibreOffice

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's much easier to just give them Open Office than to explain that LibreOffice is a derivative and the reason it forked.

Who would ever try to explain it like that?

Me: "LibreOffice is the new version of OpenOffice."
Co-worker: "Oh, ok."

Re:who cares?

[QuasiSteve]

we all moved to LibreOffice

No, not all of 'us'.

If they decide to stop copying the bad things about MS Office (cell selection navigation in Excel), and start copying the good things instead (dynamic charts), I'll happily give LibreOffice another shot. For now, I've moved back to OpenOffice.

Re:who cares?

[Palestrina]

20 million since when exactly?

You can see the details here: http://www.openoffice.org/stats/

I find it interesting that Apache gives the details to support their download numbers while LibreOffice merely waves their hands and makes claims.

Re:who cares?

[Palestrina]

But both projects claim that 80%+ of their downloads are for Windows users. So you can't really escape the numbers. Apache has then 80% of 20 million Windows downloads in *4 months* whereas LO has 80% of 20 million Windows downloads in *2 years*.

Similar for Mac at around 15%.. No doubt that LO has the advantage on Linux desktops. But all reports indicate that is 3% or so of the desktops. Even 100% of 3% is still only 3%, That doesn't look like a growth play to me,

Re:who cares?

[bigtomrodney]

I'm not so sure about that. I've seen cases where big-guns enterprise software has changed name and it's had a more positive impact. Users might have ignored a few point-version upgrades, even the occasional major upgrades. However when that new banner goes up it must be all new and good!.

Colours and words have a more tangible effect on the non-technical.

Re:who cares?

[Enry]

Since LO is bundled with many Linux distros, it's almost impossible to know the full user base of LO.

Re:who cares?

[jellomizer]

Why would you bet your reputation on an office suite?
The nature of software changes rather fast. A perfectly logical and reasonable choice 6 months ago, today may be a bad decision.

When .NET started to get popular, I recommended that they if they are going to go with .NET they should do VB.NET not C#.NET because at the time more people knew VB over C# (in the current area). However after taking that direction in about a year C#.NET became more dominant. Mainly because colleges who taught Java liked doing C# more and didn't bother with VB any more.

OK I was wrong, but my reputation wasn't affected, why? Because I try to be right more than I am wrong, I had a good reasoning behind my decision. However this industry changes, we get factors such as change in college course changes, software delivery methods, Economic pressures, Mistakes made from other companies, unexpected success...

For Open Office vs Libre Office vs Microsoft Office. I wouldn't put my reputation behind it. Ok LibreOffice got popular but Open Office isn't that much better or worse so it may not be worth it to change.

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ethereal to Wireshark.

Or Windows 98 to Windows Millenium Edition. That was a kind of name change. Maybe not the luckiest one. XP to Vista to 7 and 8.

That was a suffix change, this (*Office*) is a prefix. Not so different but I understand your concerns. Just tell them the development team moved to a new "home" and changed name. If they want to know more, development on the original OpenOffice code stagnated for a while and eventually restarted this year.

Re:who cares?

[bluefoxlucid]

NeoOffice is the OSX port.

Re:who cares?

[Omnifarious]

Not a single one of my co-workers would ever use the word 'gay' as a pejorative (well, aside possibly from one, and very likely not at work). None of them are gay either (AFAIK). They all just have an IQ higher than 90.

The problem with FOSS office suites

[concealment]

The problem with F/OSS office suites is that their audience tends to be uncritical, so much as in the fairy tale "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" (but in inverse), professionals have stopped listening.

I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents. Their main strength was that it was often easier to export data from them than it was in certain commercial products.

The point of this is that in order for one of these FOSS office suites to survive, people who are critical and have use requirements beyond short documents get involved. For these packages to be competitive, they need to rise to a higher standard than Grandma's recipes, Son's book report, a weekend memo to the boss, etc.

Re:The problem with FOSS office suites

[Chemisor]

Perhaps you should follow your own advice and post the failing test cases so we could see what's broken. Then some enterprising developer could figure out how to fix them. Complaining without specifics, as you are doing, is not practically different from being "uncritical".

Re:The problem with FOSS office suites

[leandrod]

I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents.

Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never
corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.

The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.

Re:The problem with FOSS office suites

[nine-times]

I wonder if the problem isn't more that people are failing to recognize that there are different audiences with different needs. For example in office suites, there are loads of people who just need a decent work processor for typing up simple documents, and then there are people who really want integration between their word processor, spreadsheet editor, and groupware client, and groupware server. The latter audience may be well served by going with the full MS Office/MS Exchange combination, and that keeps a lot of people using MS Office.

It reminds me of an argument between a GIMP fan and a Photoshop fan. The Photoshop user was saying, "GIMP is terrible because it doesn't have good support for CMYK." and the GIMP user responded by saying, "Well nobody actually uses CMYK, but GIMP lets me script things easily, so GIMP is much better!" These two users were talking past each other, failing to recognize that each had probably chosen their solution well.

Re:The problem with FOSS office suites

[javilon]

I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents.

Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never
corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.

The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.

From your comment and his comment I suspect that his test involved getting huge documents from different MS office versions and loading them. Then deciding that OO can't handle big documents in general. This is a very skewed test. For people moving completely to OO that's a non issue.

Re:The problem with FOSS office suites

[John Bresnahan]

OTOH, I have "saved" several Word/Excel documents that had become too corrupted to be used in Microsoft Office. All I had to do was load them in OpenOffice and then save them with a different name, and they suddenly worked again in MS Office.

Merge Libre and OpenOffice?

[shellster_dude]

This could be a fantastic thing for the Opensource Community.

Providing the OpenOffice (OO) and the LibreOffice(LO) developers can get past the bad blood of the past, they could merge their to projects back together and focus their efforts.

Re:Where is their solution for mobile users?

[ssam]

most of the openoffice devs are now libreoffice devs, so most of the recent development happens there. libreoffice is working on an android version.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/libreoffice-for-android-advances-document-viewer-is-on-the-way/

Re:Why choose OO over LO?

[VortexCortex]

Well, maybe I can clear this up. You see, they're both Open Source, but OpenOffice.org required code writing contributors (like me) to jump through hoops and assign my copyright over to the OpenOffice.org folks (Oracle), or else my contributions were denied. LibreOffice doesn't require copyright assignment to accept my contributions. So, that means it's easier to contribute to LibreOffice, and it gets updates faster. So, OpenOffice.org is missing some things that LibreOffice has. Bonus, because they're both from a common code-base, LibreOffice can just pull in anything that OpenOffice has -- The requirement of OO.o's copyright assignment meant that they could not incorporate LO code though. When Oracle decided to kill off the development of OO.o, instead of just gifting the name / trademark over to the newly forked LO folks (where most of the developers went) they gave us all the finger one more time for good measure by making OO.o an Apache project. I don't know if the Official Apache oversight of the project now means they're doing away with copyright assignments, nor do I care at this point. The name itself brings back infuriating memories of frustration and wasted efforts squandered on bureaucracy. LibreOffice already exists, so if it weren't for the older install base, it would be complete waste of time to re-do the work of merging the code back into OpenOffice.org... From a developer's perspective it IS a complete waste of time. That and there's the trademark issue where OpenOffice is owned by someone else, so you have to say OpenOffice.org when you're talking about it.

TL;DR: Stay with LO, it's actually better and not a waste of time like OO.org is.

OpenOffice dot org?

[Compaqt]

Speaking of names, is it actually "Apache OpenOffice" now? That would be an improvement over calling an office suite by the name of its website, "OpenOffice.org".

I mean, did anybody ever call it "Open Office dot org"? Judging by the comments in this thread, no.

Same for Postgres / PostgreSQL ("post greh ess queue elle").

Re:Why choose OO over LO?

[curcuru]

To clarify: - Sun took earlier work to create OpenOffice.org. They added the .org so they could register the trademark around the world. Oracle bought Sun, and after a while, someone internally said "why are we funding this thing", and essentially stopped their corporate development on the code. Some long-term contributors (from various companies) forked the code, and started a GPL licensed fork called LibreOffice. LO folks went on to create TDF = The Document Foundation as a non-profit to keep building their office suite. At that point, Oracle in all it's wisdom (ha!) decided to transfer the trademarks to the ASF and licensed their code (from their last build) to the ASF under the Apache license. Since a bunch of volunteers (yes, many of them are from IBM) showed up at Apache to work on the code, the Apache Incubator accepted them as a podling, or potential project. Today's news story is about this podling graduating to be a top level Apache project, meaning that as long as there's a community to keep building it, the ASF will provide it a home and support. While the ASF is now the legal owner of the OpenOffice.org trademarks, the product will be called Apache OpenOffice going forward. - The ASF has never required copyright assignments; in fact, we don't really accept them. We require that you license any contributions to us under the Apache license, so that the ASF can then re-ship our Apache projects under our Apache license. Once we ship a release (any project), the world is essentially free to take the code and use it whatever way they want. It's unfortunate that people keep bringing up the Sun/Oracle era copyright assignments in the context of Apache OpenOffice. - I have to laugh when various commenters ask about merging the projects. First, it's clear that the people in the projects - i.e. the volunteers (or $bigco employees paid to work on them) mostly have made it clear that they have some different objectives and ways of working. So for the actual developers working on AOO and LO, it's unlikely the communities will merge. Many people would certainly like to see more code and idea sharing. In fact LO is welcome to incorporate any released AOO code in their project. However since Apache projects don't ship GPL code, the reverse is not always true, unless someone specifically licenses the code under the Apache License to AOO. Fundamentally, AOO is happy to share code with anyone. LO will only share code with people who use the GPL. Which world seems like it would be a larger set of developers?

Re:OpenOffice dot org - Apache OpenOffice

[curcuru]

The official name of the new ASF project (and the software it ships) is Apache OpenOffice. While the ASF now legally owns the trademarks associated with OpenOffice.org, going forward we'll be using Apache OpenOffice as our trademark. While normally we require Apache projects to live at an *.apache.org domain name, given the broad (non-technical) end-user base of AOO they will still provide a user-based homepage at openoffice.org. Developers should probably go to openoffice.apache.org for technical info. ---- I'm not a lawyer, but I was an Apache OpenOffice podling mentor

LaTeX

[catchblue22]

we all moved to LibreOffice

My main document producing software is now LaTeX, using TeXShop on my Mac. It does everything I need, and the documents look pretty. Most especially, I love the ability of LaTeX to typeset equations seamlessly. Perhaps there is a slight learning curve, but it wasn't bad. And when I need to do something unusual, I use the google manual.