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Apache OpenOffice 4.0 Released With Major New Features

Posted by timothy on from the so-many-millions-of-dollars-worth-of-good dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Still the most popular open source office suite, Apache OpenOffice 4 has been released, with many new enhancements and a new sidebar, based on IBM Symphony's implementation but with many improvements. The code still has comments in German but as long as real new features keep coming and can be shared with other office suites no one is complaining." The sidebar mentioned brings frequently used controls down and beside the actual area of a word-processing doc, say, which makes some sense given how wide many displays have become. This release comes with some major improvements to graphics handling, too; anti-aliasing makes for smoother bitmaps. In conjunction with this release, SourceForge (also under the Slashdot Media umbrella) has announced the launch of an extensions collection for OO. Extensions mean that Open Office can gain capabilities from outside contributors, rather than being wrapped up in large, all-or-nothing updates. You can download the latest version of Apache OpenOffice here.

5 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Merge Already! Libre/Open by kthreadd · · Score: 4, Informative

    Because they use different licenses. OpenOffice uses the Apache license, LibreOffice mostly GPL. Merging them is not feasible since either of them would have to give up something they don't want to in return.

  2. And LibreOffice is already merging improvements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    LibreOffice 4.1 is out later this week and they already imported all the bug fixes from Apache Office. According to https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-1-new-features-and-fixes/ they picked up at least these improvements:
    "A very large number of bugs have been fixed at an estimate of around 3000 bugs, of which 400 came from authors with apache.org mail addresses."
    and
    "Sidebar (Apache OpenOffice/IBM Symphony) with resizeable layout (LibreOffice team)"

    I wonder when apache office will merge fully with LibreOffice.

  3. Re:Play Nice by Sique · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually, the story is somewhat longer and started with Star Division, a Hamburg (Germany) based company, who offered a wordprocessor in the 1980ies for 150 DM in Germany, when the comparable Microsoft Word was about 800 DM or more. StarWriter was build into a whole office suite until 1995, when it got renamed in StarOffice. In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought Star Division, and in 2002 opened the code and created OpenOffice. Completed with some non-open licensed parts (like an RDBMS; if I remember correctly, StarOffice was using ADABAS from Software AG, later the derivate SAP DB), OpenOffice was sold as StarOffice by Sun Microsoft until 2010.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  4. Re:German code comments by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 4, Informative

    Because the original codebase comes from StarOffice, which was developed by a German company (StarDivision).

    --
    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  5. Re:IBM Open Source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I can't let bullshit like that stand.

    IBM specifically dedicates a group of developers to every project they open source, as far as I can tell.

    For OpenOffice, this is even mentioned in the Wikipedia article:

    The developer pool for the Apache project was seeded by IBM employees, who continue to do the majority of the development.

    And yes, I checked the references. The statement is correct.

    You are an asshole, for lying like that. BOOO!