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OpenOffice Is Now, Officially, Apache OpenOffice

Posted by timothy on from the patchy-word-processor dept.

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.)

7 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    we all moved to LibreOffice

    1. Re:who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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."

  2. The problem with FOSS office suites by concealment · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:The problem with FOSS office suites by leandrod · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
      DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
      GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
  3. Re:Where is their solution for mobile users? by ssam · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/

  4. Re:Why choose OO over LO? by VortexCortex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:OpenOffice dot org - Apache OpenOffice by curcuru · · Score: 5, Informative

    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