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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.

3 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. 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.