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Apache OpenOffice, the Schrodinger's Application: No One Knows If It's Dead or Alive, No One Really Wants To Look Inside (theregister.co.uk)
British IT news outlet The Register looks at the myriad of challenges Apache OpenOffice faces today. From the report: Last year Brett Porter, then chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, contemplated whether a proposed official blog post on the state of Apache OpenOffice (AOO) might discourage people from downloading the software due to lack of activity in the project. No such post from the software's developers surfaced. The languid pace of development at AOO, though, has been an issue since 2011 after Oracle (then patron of the project) got into a fork-fight with The Document Foundation, which created LibreOffice from the OpenOffice codebase, and asked developers backing the split to resign.
Back in 2015, Red Hat developer Christian Schaller called OpenOffice "all but dead." Assertions to that effect have continued since, alongside claims to the contrary. Almost a year ago, Jim Jagielski, a member of the Apache OpenOffice Project Management Committee, insisted things were going well and claimed there was renewed interest in the project. For all the concern about AOO, no issues have been raised recently before the Apache Foundation board to suggest ongoing difficulties. The project is due to provide an update this month, according to a spokesperson for the foundation.
Back in 2015, Red Hat developer Christian Schaller called OpenOffice "all but dead." Assertions to that effect have continued since, alongside claims to the contrary. Almost a year ago, Jim Jagielski, a member of the Apache OpenOffice Project Management Committee, insisted things were going well and claimed there was renewed interest in the project. For all the concern about AOO, no issues have been raised recently before the Apache Foundation board to suggest ongoing difficulties. The project is due to provide an update this month, according to a spokesperson for the foundation.
Do they have an official build manager yet? Last that I remember was that they couldn't get a compiled version out the door because no one was left who knew how to build it.
I have a 10 year old computer that used to lag running OO, but the past few years it runs libreoffice without any problems.
The thing Sun wrote was bloated and slow. OO added a lot of features. LO is basically "finished" IMO.
One of the great things about IBM, when their old software sucks, they deprecate it. There was a time they were even bribing their professional services clients to switch from AIX to Linux, because AIX didn't have any use case other than "change is hard." Not very much of the software I use is from IBM, but when it is I welcome it. They don't always have my interests in mind, but that's OK because they're honest about their technology in a way that few companies are. I'm not going to use DB2, but they don't try to force me; their stuff integrates fine with PostgreSQL! $lt;3 But yeah, let Lotus Symphony die. There are still people who love Lotus Notes, which is fine for them, but who loves Lotus Symphony? It was like Geocities website builder but for creating proprietary apps. That works better for having semi-technical people write custom report apps than for real software that would get distributed.