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Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What?
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word, and that's in large part thanks to the success of the OpenOffice family of word processors. "Family," because the OpenOffice name has been attached to several branches of a codebase that's gone through some serious evolution over the years, starting from its roots in closed-source StarOffice, acquired and open-sourced by Sun to become OpenOffice.org. The same software has led (via some hamfisted moves by Oracle after its acquisition of Sun) to the also-excellent LibreOffice. OpenOffice.org's direct descendant is Apache OpenOffice, and an anonymous reader writes with this excellent news from that project: "The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache OpenOffice has been downloaded 100 million times. Over 100 million downloads, over 750 extensions, over 2,800 templates. But what does the community at Apache need to do to get the next 100 million?" If you want to play along, you can get the latest version of OpenOffice from SourceForge (Slashdot's corporate cousin). I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, created when some core developers were worried with Oracle's lack of attention to the project. Some time after that fork, Oracle donated OpenOffice.org code and trademarks to the Apache Software Foundation to continue the project.
you are funny, the miniscule percentage of government spending that goes to Microsoft is a budget rounding error
And if Microsoft fell, those people would do other things for a living, maybe even get a few good companies while losing one giant crappy one
Calendaring is one a business task that is critically important to many businesses, but is quite widely ignored in the open source world, at least with respect to easy setup.
In my small office, we use Apple's open source Darwin Calendar Server: http://trac.calendarserver.org... It'll serve calendar data to the mac calendar client, as well as Mozilla's Sunbird client, probably others too.
It works great and it has been extremely stable (I have it running on a debian VM), but it isn't totally trivial to set up. Not hard exactly, but certain OS defaults don't work (e.g., requires extended atrributes, which requires editing fstab, and if you don't, it will never ever work): https://wiki.debian.org/HowTo/...
Anyway, a simple to set up calendar server would be a substantial contribution to the open source business software stable.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good