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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.

12 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Merge Already! Libre/Open by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They are merging! LibreOffice imports all useful bits. They even keep a running commentary on any commits that are still going into apache office saying which are useful, which are not useful or which libreoffice commits fix something in a more elegant way: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?h=aoo/trunk&showmsg=1

  2. Re:They seem to be doing a fine job. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is garbage. 5% of contributions to LO 4.1 came from apache.

    Claiming everything came from apache is an IBM marketing lie and they've been called out on it.

  3. Sidebar the differentiator - really? by JImbob0i0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well since they laud the new sidebar so much for better use of widescreen monitors they should love the fact that LibreOffice will have it within a few days...

    4.1 is due in a matter of days which has an improved sidebar that's resizeable and not just a static part of the screen.

    I really question what the point of AOO is at this juncture given that LO is clearly the more active project and has two years of code clean up and development over AOO due to the way Oracle let it stagnate for so long.

    If you want to try 4.1 now it is on the pre-releases page and it's the final RC there ... ie the same that will be released as final GA in a few days.

    1. Re:Sidebar the differentiator - really? by JImbob0i0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Too bad users use the product and don't gain direct productivity merely from looking at Ohloh stats.

      But the stats do paint the picture of the direct benefit to the users...

      See all those deleted lines? That's code clean up that is... That means less bugs and easier to maintain and also easier for new people to help with when they get an itch they need to scratch.

      It shows that the average AOO contributor makes twice the number of commits as the average LO contributor. And the average AOO commit is far more significant, touching twice the number of files as the average LO commit. Net it out and the average AOO contributor is 4x as productive compared to the average LO contributor!

      Way to twist the statistics...

      In a way what you say is absolutely true but then that misses the mark but quite an impressive amount. It's almost to the point I feel a need to call you out on this as being literally true so no one can call you a liar but that truth being represented in such a way as to mask the real situation.

      The recent libreoffice blog post covers the the growth of committers and includes a brief discussion of "the long tail" with a large number of people in the community submitting small fixes here and there because they can and to scratch a small itch... this is not happening on the AOO code base.

      To me that shows a healthier development community of in the LO camp.

      Put it this way if a project has 100 people each committing to 2 files over a code base and another project which had 2 people committing to 100 files over another fork which would you say was "more productive" and would you equate that with project healthiness?

    2. Re:Sidebar the differentiator - really? by Palestrina · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I hope you know that you did not address my argument at all but merely attacked me personally.

      There was a false assertion that the Sidebar was not done at Apache. I rebutted that. I then remarked that LibreOffice *supporters* seem to have difficulty graciously accepting the fact that the most notable feature of LO 4.1 is coming from Apache. You responded by saying that you have never seem a TDF member saying anything bad about AOO. That is irrelevant, since that was not my claim. And it is also untrue since I could point to ample examples of this.

      From my perspective LO is downstream. A look at their logs shows that their use of AOO code is frequent and routine. They are not occasionally cherry picking, but deliberately mining every relevant patch:

      http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?h=aoo/trunk&showmsg=1

      In any case, I imagine this large scale use of AOO code is a source of some cognitive dissonance for them, after spending so much time trying to convince themselves that having a fork was better than working together with Apache, arguing that nothing good would ever come from Apache. Now they are faced once again with the inconvenient facts, that the AOO code is good, it is worth taking in large quantities. In fact their users are demanding this. TDF members were beaten up quite a bit at a recent conference from users demanding to know when they would improve their UI like Apache was. Somehow they need to reconcile these facts and their actions with their ongoing stance of non-cooperation with Apache.

  4. Re:And LibreOffice is already merging improvements by luciano.moretti · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It won't. At this point the codebases have incompatible licensing. LibreOffice can continue to pull in code from OpenOffice, but OpenOffice cannot pull back in code from LibreOffice.

    As such, LibreOffice will likely continue to have major releases a week after OpenOffice, where all the good stuff from OpenOffice will get pulled in, but none of the good stuff from LibreOffice will be ported to OpenOffice.

  5. Re:They seem to be doing a fine job. by Palestrina · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm sure you can make the huge contribution of the AOO Sidebar look numerically 5% if you do two things:

    1) Count the entire Sidebar UI as a single commit, which Ohloh does because the work was done on a branch, not the trunk. (Ohloh counts only the AOO trunk)

    2) Bloat your own commit counts with insignificant "behind the scenes cleanup" like translating German comments, or other stuff that no user will ever benefit from.

    But if you look at features of actual significance, what the users actually want and will benefit from, the code from Apache is actually quite significant in LibreOffice.

    I wish LibreOffice supporters would stop acting like it makes them small to acknowledge some gratitude to other open source projects which they are dependent on.

  6. Re:And LibreOffice is already merging improvements by Palestrina · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually, this is not quite true. There are a good number of contributors who are happy to work with both projects. They don't care about the license bullshit. They contribute equally to both projects. So there is a fair amount of code making it back into AOO from LibreOffice.

    Also, some supports of free office software, like the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) which sponsored much of the OOXML improvements in LibreOffice, have put a clause in their contracts that requires the code produced to be made under the Apache License, even when the code is targeted to LibreOffice. So AOO will have access to that work as well.

    Of course, these are just small improvements to an overall climate of inefficiency. And the inefficiency goes in both directions. To the extent LO does not contribute patches upstream they are creating a deferred merge expense that will increase over time, each time they try to merge features down from AOO.

  7. Re:Merge Already! Libre/Open by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Nothing like one-way leeching to keep a project going. Seems silly to split because of lack of activity from Oracle and then devolve into leeching changes from Apache.

  8. Re:Merge Already! Libre/Open by Tough+Love · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If Libreoffice does end up dominating (Openoffice still has the most old and new users because of inertia and name recognition) then it will be convincing evidence of the evolutionary superiority of copyleft.

    At this point I'm betting on Libreoffice + LGPL. Hope I don't get any "libertarian license" jihadis steamed about that, but this just seems like reality.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  9. Re:LAWL @ "Letting the code speak for them" by jensend · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm not a Libreoffice developer, just a reader of these fora and a former OpenOffice user who is sick and tired of reading your bull. (I originally left OO because your license purge removed features I needed; so much for your silly attempt in another post to try to take the "pragmatic high ground" by characterizing LO's position as "that license bullshit.")

    I'm not interested in hearing your eternal rationalizations about why your statistics are so much better than LO's. I've been hearing this crap for years now. You start frothing at the mouth any time somebody says something positive about LO, you don't release anything notable for 2 1/2 years, and you call this "letting the code speak for you."

    Meanwhile LO may

  10. Re:And LibreOffice is already merging improvements by Palestrina · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You were either attempting to argue against my claim that there were contributions from LibreOffice coming back into Apache OpenOffice, in an ad hominen attack. Or you were merely interjecting irrelevancies. I'm willing to accept that you were merely being irrelevant. In any case you never bothered to substantiate *any* of your claims so I waste no time rebutting them.