Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What? 285
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.
Re:You can probably thank Microsoft for this... (Score:5, Funny)
I think is has more to due with Microsoft lack of advancement in Office... For the most part what we are doing in Office 2013, is the same stuff we were doing in Office 95.
Sure there were some incremental changes that took advantage of newer technologies, some new UI changes that I am not sure if it makes things better. But for the most part things haven't changed too much.
Word is still a word processor,
Excel is still a spreadsheet
Outlook is still a memory hog
Access is still causing businesses to slowly go bankrupt.
Power Point is still making meetings boring.
Using Open/Libra office, we get the stuff that we wan't it is compatible enough to not look like a jerk (say even 10 years ago) for not being able to read the document.
I don't use Microsoft proprietary software (Score:5, Funny)
I use Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote.