OpenOffice Is Now, Officially, Apache OpenOffice

rbowen writes "Apache OpenOffice has graduated from the Incubator, and now is officially a top-level project at the Apache Software Foundation." From the announcement: "As with all Apache software, Apache OpenOffice software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Information on Apache OpenOffice source code, documentation, mailing lists, related resources, and ways to participate are available at http://openoffice.apache.org." (Download mirror on Sourceforge, too.)

Re:The problem with FOSS office suites

[leandrod]

I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents.

Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never
corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.

The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.

Re:who cares?

[Palestrina]

But both projects claim that 80%+ of their downloads are for Windows users. So you can't really escape the numbers. Apache has then 80% of 20 million Windows downloads in *4 months* whereas LO has 80% of 20 million Windows downloads in *2 years*.

Similar for Mac at around 15%.. No doubt that LO has the advantage on Linux desktops. But all reports indicate that is 3% or so of the desktops. Even 100% of 3% is still only 3%, That doesn't look like a growth play to me,

Re:The problem with FOSS office suites

[javilon]

I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents.

Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never
corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.

The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.

From your comment and his comment I suspect that his test involved getting huge documents from different MS office versions and loading them. Then deciding that OO can't handle big documents in general. This is a very skewed test. For people moving completely to OO that's a non issue.

Re:Where is their solution for mobile users?

[ssam]

most of the openoffice devs are now libreoffice devs, so most of the recent development happens there. libreoffice is working on an android version.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/libreoffice-for-android-advances-document-viewer-is-on-the-way/ [arstechnica.com]

Re:who cares?

[Enry]

Since LO is bundled with many Linux distros, it's almost impossible to know the full user base of LO.

Re:who cares?

[MightyYar]

LibreOffice had a long-running bug on documents with wrap set on certain objects that rendered my invoices almost unusable, so I'm still on OpenOffice. I do appreciate the work they've done, though.

If I were going to do coding work on one of the suites, I might pick OpenOffice for the more permissive license.

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ethereal to Wireshark.

Or Windows 98 to Windows Millenium Edition. That was a kind of name change. Maybe not the luckiest one. XP to Vista to 7 and 8.

That was a suffix change, this (*Office*) is a prefix. Not so different but I understand your concerns. Just tell them the development team moved to a new "home" and changed name. If they want to know more, development on the original OpenOffice code stagnated for a while and eventually restarted this year.

Re:who cares?

[bluefoxlucid]

Some big-name government organizations ban C#.NET because their codebase is in VB.NET and they don't want rogue developers making a mixed codebase like OpenOffice.org with some of it in Java, some in C, some in C++, some in Haskell.

Re:who cares?

[bluefoxlucid]

NeoOffice is the OSX port.

Re:who cares?

[MightyYar]

Because there was an un-broken version of the software?

I submitted the bug, provided sample documents, and ran tests that they asked me to. I don't think anyone wants me submitting C++ code...

Re:Stills needs Java?

[Andy Prough]

I heard there was a little button thingey you could click to run it without Java. And I heard there was a website called "portableapps" that has portable versions of OOo and LO that you can put on a thumbdrive and run on any computer. I heard all that - but I'm quite sure its all lies - nasty, nasty lies.

Re:Why choose OO over LO?

[curcuru]

To clarify: - Sun took earlier work to create OpenOffice.org. They added the .org so they could register the trademark around the world. Oracle bought Sun, and after a while, someone internally said "why are we funding this thing", and essentially stopped their corporate development on the code. Some long-term contributors (from various companies) forked the code, and started a GPL licensed fork called LibreOffice. LO folks went on to create TDF = The Document Foundation as a non-profit to keep building their office suite. At that point, Oracle in all it's wisdom (ha!) decided to transfer the trademarks to the ASF and licensed their code (from their last build) to the ASF under the Apache license. Since a bunch of volunteers (yes, many of them are from IBM) showed up at Apache to work on the code, the Apache Incubator accepted them as a podling, or potential project. Today's news story is about this podling graduating to be a top level Apache project, meaning that as long as there's a community to keep building it, the ASF will provide it a home and support. While the ASF is now the legal owner of the OpenOffice.org trademarks, the product will be called Apache OpenOffice going forward. - The ASF has never required copyright assignments; in fact, we don't really accept them. We require that you license any contributions to us under the Apache license, so that the ASF can then re-ship our Apache projects under our Apache license. Once we ship a release (any project), the world is essentially free to take the code and use it whatever way they want. It's unfortunate that people keep bringing up the Sun/Oracle era copyright assignments in the context of Apache OpenOffice. - I have to laugh when various commenters ask about merging the projects. First, it's clear that the people in the projects - i.e. the volunteers (or $bigco employees paid to work on them) mostly have made it clear that they have some different objectives and ways of working. So for the actual developers working on AOO and LO, it's unlikely the communities will merge. Many people would certainly like to see more code and idea sharing. In fact LO is welcome to incorporate any released AOO code in their project. However since Apache projects don't ship GPL code, the reverse is not always true, unless someone specifically licenses the code under the Apache License to AOO. Fundamentally, AOO is happy to share code with anyone. LO will only share code with people who use the GPL. Which world seems like it would be a larger set of developers?

Re:OpenOffice dot org - Apache OpenOffice

[curcuru]

The official name of the new ASF project (and the software it ships) is Apache OpenOffice. While the ASF now legally owns the trademarks associated with OpenOffice.org, going forward we'll be using Apache OpenOffice as our trademark. While normally we require Apache projects to live at an *.apache.org domain name, given the broad (non-technical) end-user base of AOO they will still provide a user-based homepage at openoffice.org. Developers should probably go to openoffice.apache.org for technical info. ---- I'm not a lawyer, but I was an Apache OpenOffice podling mentor

Re:Why choose OO over LO?

[Suddenly_Dead]

Which world seems like it would be a larger set of developers?

There are two different underlying questions here which could potentially have two completely different answers:

A) Which project will have the larger set of developers using its code in some manner
B) Which project will have the larger set of developers contributing back to it?

LaTeX

[catchblue22]

we all moved to LibreOffice

My main document producing software is now LaTeX, using TeXShop on my Mac. It does everything I need, and the documents look pretty. Most especially, I love the ability of LaTeX to typeset equations seamlessly. Perhaps there is a slight learning curve, but it wasn't bad. And when I need to do something unusual, I use the google manual.