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Is Apache OpenOffice Finally On the Way Out? (apache.org)
Reader JImbob0i0 writes: After almost another year without a release and another major CVE leaving users vulnerable for that year the Chairman of the Project Management Committee has started public discussions on what it will entail to retire the project, following the Apache Board showing concern at the poor showing.
It's been a long battle which would have been avoided if Oracle had not been so petty. Did this behaviour actually help get momentum in the community underway though? What ifs are always hard to properly answer. Hopefully this long drawn out death rattle will finally come to a close and the wounds with LibreOffice can heal with the last few contributors to AOO joining the rest of the community.
It's been a long battle which would have been avoided if Oracle had not been so petty. Did this behaviour actually help get momentum in the community underway though? What ifs are always hard to properly answer. Hopefully this long drawn out death rattle will finally come to a close and the wounds with LibreOffice can heal with the last few contributors to AOO joining the rest of the community.
OpenOffice still has the major benefit that they were able to take it completely to Apache licensing which most business prefer. There are multiple large companies that straight out ban LibreOffice on their premises because of the risk that macros and document data will have to be released as GPL.
Another victim of the Oracle bean counters. It is amazing how much value a talented group of people can destroy when they work at it.
MS Office will always be superior. Why use a crappy clone when the best is readily available?
just open source licenses functioning as intended.
This seems idiotic.
Oracle's antics caused me to switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, not from any "GPL Purity" reasons (which I care little about) but from a reasonable suspicion that Oracle, being Evil, would soon do something I did not like.
When it was given to Apache, I'd basically consider it a toss-up between the two, but I was already on LibreOffice, and didn't have any particular reason to go back. Since then, Libre seems to be a more active project than Open, so I prefer it on that basis.
I suspect that's a lot of the issue -- People left "because Oracle" (makes Signs against Evil) they're very close to the same software, one is getting more work done on it than the other, no particular reason to prefer OpenOffice.
What did they do this time?
With the AOO project folding up its tent, that just leave LO and the small projects like Abiword and Gnumeric to fill in the office app space. Of course, it also means that Red Hat takes control of yet another big user space project that now has no competition. Look for essential LO dependencies on systemd coming soon, and gradual death of LO on Windows.
OpenOffice died the moment LibreOffice forked it. The ghost of OpenOffice.org just didn't know it was dead. When most of your major developers leave to carry on a competing project, the prior project dies.
I haven't been keeping up with the details of the pie fight. Apart from the licensing issue (which, for your typical end-user, is not an issue at all), what features separate Apache OpenOffice from LibreOffice.org?
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Let Open Office die. LibreOffice is much, much better!
It uses Java so its massive quantity of busy waits and dead locks may have reached the level where it needs to get purged from the system.
Names they are trying:
Old Yeller
Titanic
Spartacus
McMurphy
Oracle (for whatever reason) has no community trust. MariaDB and other forks are getting common use and will likely see the same shift.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
I hope that OpenOffice will hand over their trade mark to LibreOffice. Especially many Windows users do not seem to know that LibreOffice exists, and are still using the now outdated OpenOffice. It would be great if the OpenOffice sites would point to LibreOffice, a worthy successor of them.
one micro-second later, I downloaded and switched. I havn't looked back. Thank you LibreOffice.
Oracle attempts to make an obscene profit on any thing it touches and usually destroys it in the process if it can't.
It's the same reason why I won't use virtualbox either.. Now if someone would fork that and get USB support into open-source support (if possible), I would gladly switch due to the impending implosion of VMWare's Workstation after they fired all of their devs. Workstation is dead (much like AOO died), Workstation just doesn't know it yet... We'll probably never see another major release of Workstation and V12 is a POS since it dropped unity and only partially supports DX10 video. I'm "stuck" on V11
Been a AOO user for quite some time and always annoyed by its bugginess but its usable for my needs. Comment section explained a lot. On my way to move to Libre Office now... and I know why now. Thanks all!
Your information is out of date. Whoooosh, Inc was later bought out by Strawman Incorporated, a virtual dark company registered somewhere in Panama, or was it the Caymans, whose very existence is denied by the company's lawyers, even if they existed.
I'll be honest: I have no idea what this is about. Are there Apache OpenOffice v. LibreOffice religious wars? I'm passively looking for a replacement for Microsoft Office. The news that Apache OpenOffice *might* be discontinued is by itself the kiss of death.
Is LibreOffice any good? This on their web site "LibreOffice is a powerful office suite – its clean interface and feature-rich tools help you unleash your creativity and enhance your productivity" makes me cringe. But Microsoft makes me cringe, so that's okay.
Don't blame me. I wanted it called Officey McOfficeface.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
There seems to be hope that OpenOffice will disappear and leave the field to LibreOffice.
However, LibreOffice has a terrible name and is not alone, you will see occasionally LibreThis and LibreThat.
The issue is that 'free' in Engish may point to free as in beer and free as in freedom.
Please, Slashdot, collect suggestions from readers for a new name. Methinks LibreOffice should morph to FreedomOffice.
Lets just hope this happens in such a way that current OpenOffice users find out about LibreOffice.
In a recent interview with Satan, he said that Microsoft is still way ahead of Oracle in doing evil.
Oh, wait. Oracle apparently and unfortunately seems to have a highly viable financial model. The current problem is merely that OpenOffice is NOT a part of those profits.
So how about considering SOLUTIONS. At least LibreOffice got mentioned in a couple of posts, but the underlying problem remains unaddressed: Is the financial model viable? I don't know enough about LibreOffice to say, but if the economic model is as fundamentally broken, then it doesn't really matter, does it?
What about a BETTER financial model? Beating the same dead horse, but how about creating a simple mechanism for the lusers... Er, I mean the honorable users, to fund OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) with special focus on the features they actually WANT?
I just love flogging that dead horse, don't I? Even worse that the same dead horse could be used to make slashdot viable (pending its next change of ownership and debt assumption).
Yeah, of course I'm talking about the idea of the charity share brokerage where the users would buy shares in ongoing-cost projects for features they want to keep using and feature development projects for new features. At this point I can only believe that it's the breakeven idea that is anathema. Unless there are profits, no one is interested, eh?
I'd start another poll on the topic, but it seems pointless. If anyone is interested (and I'm not holding my breath), feel free to make the polite request for additional details. Meanwhile, I'll continue switching over to LibreOffice pending its demise. OpenOffice, it was nice knowing ya, and I'll try to attend the funeral if it's sufficiently convenient.
Oh yeah. One more thing. I have to express the usual disappointment with the state of today's slashdot and the lack of high-quality comments. If the charity share brokerage system were in effect, features that would improve the quality of the discussions would be my favored donations. Not sure if that means addressing the trollage or fixing the moderation, but right now there is no decision to be made because there is no such system.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Does everything I need to do.
Why would us "last few contributors to AOO [join] the rest of the community"? Do you imagine we don't contribute to LibreOffice only because AOO still exists?