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) 98
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.
Build manager (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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Sorry Oracle but you are almost as bad for open source projects as M$.
Yea, just look at what they did for Solaris.....
Look, Oracle is out to make money, no more, no less. If FOSS helps, they will support it, if FOSS isn't helping them make money, they are going to ignore it. I'm guessing Open Office falls in the latter category, while Java in the former (not that Java is Free Open Source Software, just traditionally free).
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Look, Oracle is out to make money, no more, no less.
They are also seeking a Sith apprentice to work with Lord Ellison.
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Oracle doesn't want to deal with the consumer market or the small business market. They want the big contracts.
Java, helps them with that, because Java is still the "Enterprise" Programming language. So the big dev shops still use Java.
OpenOffice though, those are just for people who are too cheap to use MS Office, besides LibreOffice took over so there is even less intensive.
Solaris and the UltraSparc platform by the time Oracle bought them was already on it way out. It was a great architecture, however
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Sorry Oracle but you are almost as bad for open source projects as M$.
Look, Oracle is out to make money, no more, no less. If FOSS helps, they will support it, if FOSS isn't helping them make money, they are going to ignore it.
History shows that when they buy a company making money off of FOSS, they change all the policies to be anti-FOSS and happily stop making that money.
Oracle cares where their money comes from. If it doesn't come from doing Evil, they don't want it to tarnish them. They would sooner cut off their hands than accept money from FOSS.
If I see an executable named "ooffice" it is a symlink to libreoffice, and that's exactly how Oracle wants the world to be.
Larry Ellison fires employees for saying "hi" to him. Peopl
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Look, Oracle is out to make money, no more, no less. If FOSS helps, they will support it,
If FOSS helps Oracle make money, then Oracle will try to find a way to possess it. I say that based on their history.
Done! (Score:2)
Re:Done! (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on what you mean by finished?
LibreOffice has added more Calc functions than AOO. LO also has patched up UNO allowing for faster run and has added wrappers for VBA scripts into UNO calls. OOXML support in AAO is horrible, LO has greatly improved OOXML since the split. The backends for Base in LO is moving away from Java, slowly, but eventually Java will not be needed unless you need JDBC connectivity. LO included recent ODF updates that allow font embedding in documents, AOO lacks this ability. AOO is using the old IBM Symphony libs for the sidebar and some other UI elements. LO has redone these to move away from the dependency on IBM libs. IBM has also deprecated those libs.
So yeah AOO might be finished and focuses on just polishing the features they have, but at the same time LO is adding features which because of the licensing differences between the two any LO updates cannot be imported into AOO. But any AOO updates can be merged into LO.
Re:Done! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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>The thing Sun wrote was bloated and slow. OO added a lot of features. LO is basically "finished" IMO.
sun didn't write it, but rather bought it.
It was part of their vision of a return to more powerful central servers with smart terminals. OO would run on the center, and display, with your sun-session able to follow you from machine to machine.
OO originally came from a german company whose name slips mind, and was free for commercial and academic use, with a paid commercial version.
I used it from version
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Sun didn't write it; they bought StarOffice from the german companyStarDivision (or some such)
I''d used StarOffice since 1.x, except for the horrific 4.x with the "feature" of its own desktop.
Sun's vision was a return to powerful central computers, but this time with smart to very smart terminals. Your session could follow you from one to another, as it was really running centrally.
They needed an office suite to run on the center, and StarOffice already ran on X.
As their plan was to make the money from the
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except for the horrific 4.x with the "feature" of its own desktop
Oh I'm pretty sure I'm the odd one out when I say, that I hated that feature, but then it really grew on me. But looking back, I totally understand why everyone hated it. But still, I really started to enjoy it but yeah it was bad. I think it took a special kind of masochist to like it.
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What made it s unusable was not just the grab of scree space, so that empty "desktop" blocked access sot other application, but that this effectively brought *all* of its documents to the front, and took away focus-follows-mouse access to other documents.
I thought that losing focus-follows-mouse would be the hardest part of switching back to mac, but it turned to be only #2--not being able to select and middle-click to paste was the biggest.
hawk
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In college they taught single document interface and multiple document interface as a personal preference, with no best practices.
Now they teach some nonsense about how even having features confuses the user.
Fork Tree (Score:5, Informative)
Well that looks like a mess! At least the re-mergers keep it from being a 100% textbook case of the xkcd on standards? [xkcd.com]
.
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It would look like Word Perfect
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Forks and derivative software [wikipedia.org] Well that looks like a mess! At least the re-mergers keep it from being a 100% textbook case of the xkcd on standards? [xkcd.com] .
At this point it hardly even makes sense to refer to LibreOffice as a fork, except in the barest historical sense.
More like "OpenOffice is a primitive ancestor of LibreOffice" or something.
It's like insisting on always calling Joomla a "fork of Mambo" or something ...
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issues (Score:5, Insightful)
For all the concern about AOO, no issues have been raised recently before the Apache Foundation board to suggest ongoing difficulties.
I think it would have to have some remaining users to have issues filed, wouldn't it?
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Is this true? Wikipedia says that LibreOffice has ~120 million users, I can't find an estimate of AOO users.
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Is this true? Wikipedia says that LibreOffice has ~120 million users, I can't find an estimate of AOO users.
Maybe he's going by "downloads" reported in the article ... who knows.
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outside of linux distributions where libreoffice is currently the 'default', apache openoffice has more users... hell, even if you include those default installs, it still probably does.
And you know this how?
why? (Score:1)
Everyone switched to libre. Why should anyone care about it? Is it somehow better than LO? If you want us to care, convince us it is worth caring,. WTF with the privileged pity party.
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The only thing that OpenOffice has going for it is printing envelopes works, while it is broken in LibreOffice(it doesn't set the page size correctly). So, going back to OpenOffice for those who insist on printing envelopes is an option for those people.
Re: why? (Score:1)
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WW2 was sort of like if Larry Ellison owned a country.
Dr. McCoy checked it out (Score:5, Funny)
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.
It's dead Jim.
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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.
It's dead Jim.
"He's dim, Jed"
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Stick a fork in it? (Score:2)
Considering the LibreOffice success, why would OpenOffice continue?
Isn't one of the beauties of open source it's resilience when something becomes abandonware?
OpenOffice is dead... long live LibreOffice... or Neo... or whatever it's called....
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If I remember correctly wasn't there a bunch of devs jumping ship to go to libreoffice at one point? Which would explain why libreoffice is more popular and has a faster release cycle.
Give up or explain... (Score:2)
As it stands, I don't even know what they would even *claim* to offer over LibreOffice, they haven't exactly conveyed anything except 'well we aren't dead yet', so I have no idea why I should even think about caring at this point.
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Does it matter much? If you get the 2012 version and it still works then why be anxious over new versions?
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Has LO yet fixed the PDF export bug that occasionally and secretly* mangles your text just because you used a different font? I went back to OO because of this.
* In LO, at least the 5.x and 6.x versions I've used, the text in the exported PDF _looks_ fine but if you actually highlight and copy-paste it, the results are occasionally not what you'd expect.
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Same as Word 2007 PDF export then! Maybe they were after a bug-for-bug compatibilty!
typo in title (Score:2)
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Oh, the irony...
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Also no need to look at it at all (Score:5, Insightful)
LibreOffice is working fine and does not come with the baggage idiots playing politics have attached to OpenOffice. This is one fork that worked as it should: With all the smart and competent moving to the fork and leaving the idiots behind to fail as they deserve.
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Simple: You are not smart and competent. Why do you ask?
Their users have not heard about LibreOffice (Score:1)
Those that download OpenOffice are people that have not heard of LibreOffice.
What keeps the downloads of OpenOffice is the legacy name.
The development of OpenOffice has effectively stopped.
The people that offer to help OpenOffice are not experienced programmers.
They suggest to help with documentation and still the OpenOffice documentation is so out of date.
Not everyone has moved to LibreOffice (Score:3)
OpenOffice vs LibreOffice I am agnostic they are just tools. And I don't get paid to fiddle with tools I just use them to do work.
Just my 2 cents
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Who cares? (Score:2)
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Not quite. For code that must be compiled before installation, there is the need to maintain the code even if nothing changes. Programming standards change and what was once legal may not be so later on.
renewed interest (Score:2)
Sorry guys, that was just me looking to see whether it was still possible to convert 15 year old files from .SDW format to .ODT when I transferred old data to a new PC.
AOO lost it's chance and is dead (Score:2)
When the project arrived in Apache Foundation's hands, LibreOffice had already started moving forward and improving...
Instead of trying to catch up, they started to change the code to replace GPL parts with non-GPL for political reasons, resulting in being even more late in the race.
Most developpers saw an active community, working on improving a tool and another one who was fiddling around, doing some pointless work... and those who wanted to improve OpenOffice went to the most active one : L
I know what they should do. (Score:1)
Put a "Smokey the Bear" hat on it and call it "Carl"!