Why is Apache clinging to OpenOffice?

The worst thing about this was that openoffice was starting to get some name recognition before oracle killed it, and this whole debacle intentionally or unintentionally turned that name recognition into a weapon against LibreOffice.<p>Ideally they should have given LibreOffice the OpenOffice name, but even if they had just said &quot;openoffice is dead&quot; then it would have been easy for people to find libreoffice.<p>Unfortunately, by taking over the OpenOffice name and absolutely refusing to admit that development has ceased, Apache has caused tons of confusion that has massively harmed libreoffice, because for years people who had heard about &quot;openoffice&quot; would see the terrible, out of date, insecure pile of junk being distributed by the Apache Foundation and not realize that the actively developed LibreOffice was available.<p>In the case of linux distributions it was less of an issue since they just switched to LibreOffice, but I wouldn&#x27;t be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice (and possibly taking one look at it and giving up and switching to Office 365).<p>Apache should have killed OpenOffice years ago but at the very least they should take it down and honestly apologize for fucking this up so badly.<p>Even ignoring the harm to LibreOffice it&#x27;s just irresponsible for Apache to keep distributing OpenOffice when they can&#x27;t even make new releases to simply apply security patches for years.

The mark of a good open source maintainer is the ability to, when your personal interest wanes, find a new maintainer and hand over.<p>I&#x27;ve done this several times, and certainly development went on much slower than before, but them&#x27;s the breaks. At least I did the right thing.<p>For such a big organization, with so many open source projects under its big wing, Apache has failed on this mark of maintainership <i>completely</i>. It failed so badly that at this stage, deploying Apache-maintained software for a customer or employer is downright irresponsible.<p>Would you organize all your company&#x27;s internal communications around Google&#x27;s latest messaging thing? That&#x27;s insane, you know it&#x27;ll bite you in the ass in a few years time when it gets cancelled. Apache is no better.

To be honest I never understood why Apache even started in the first place. By that time the LibreOffice fork was well underway.

I&#x27;m in the business of building a word processor.<p>Besides OpenOffice, there is generally reduced downloads of both OpenOffice and LibreOffice. This is not surprising.<p>The world is moving past system-installed, standalone editors, saving them into a file and exchanging them over emails. The convenience that comes with editing, sharing and collaborating right from the browser is picking up speed, and it&#x27;s a good thing. We have unlimited version history and the social features (comments, reactions and data tables, with ratings and upvotes as column types like in Coda &#x2F; Notion) is unmatchable with what a traditional word processor can offer.<p>The world is evolving into a different future of Office apps and Apache&#x27;s projects don&#x27;t fit into that ecosystem.

Does Apache <i>ever</i> &quot;declare&quot; anything dead? In my experience things are just allowed to drift quietly into bureaucratic ghost towns. I&#x27;m not sure if they&#x27;ve ever formally disbanded a project, but maybe somebody has an example.<p>It would be helpful if OpenOffice were formally killed though. The name &quot;Libreoffice&quot; is not particularly catchy and I can never remember which is which even though I actually have LibreOffice installed on the computer I&#x27;m using right now.<p>Edit: Oh here&#x27;s an example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;river.apache.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;river.apache.org&#x2F;</a> but it took them several years to come to terms with it, but then again that was quicker than OpenOffice, yes.<p>Edit again: I think coincidentally (or not) Apache River has a similar history to OpenOffice, in that after buying Sun Microsystems, Oracle &quot;donated&quot; it to Apache, &quot;donated&quot; meaning &quot;Good luck, this isn&#x27;t our problem anymore.&quot; One of those things that looks like goodwill but really isn&#x27;t...

Here&#x27;s what I suggested as a goal for OpenOffice, in <i>September 2016</i> which is now six years ago, as a response to Apache officer Jim Jagielski (&quot;jimjag&quot;) who thought this was going well:<p>[[[ I urge you, or the Apache board generally, to look at the facts, and not get yourself into the mess of trusting AOO project members&#x27; gut instinct that everything is fine or that the board&#x27;s oversight is the problem and you should just stop looking. For sure, it is possible that they&#x27;ll actually manage to turn this around. But there are already AOO people convinced they&#x27;ve done it, and there were six months ago, when in fact as you know they were in deep trouble already. Their feelings about this aren&#x27;t going to be objective. If in say, three months, there&#x27;s no measurable evidence that AOO is back on course then regardless of what is said by the handful of AOO people, retirement is the right choice.<p>For example, shipping AOO 4.2 in 10 weeks at ApacheConEU. That&#x27;s not crazy. Libreoffice goes from feature freeze to release in 10 weeks. A healthy AOO development community should be able to do it, or come so close as to leave no-one in any doubt. ]]]<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;699680&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;699680&#x2F;</a><p>Again, I wrote that in September 2016. Did Apache in fact ship OpenOffice 4.2 at that year&#x27;s ApacheConEU? No they did not. OK, so when did they finally ship the &quot;imminent&quot; OpenOffice 4.2? Never.<p>Here&#x27;s what the most recent quarterly summary from the Apache OpenOffice project to Apache&#x27;s board said about version 4.2, &quot;An alpha and&#x2F;or beta release is planned for the next quarter&quot;. That sounds optimistic doesn&#x27;t it? Well, sadly that&#x27;s also what it said in January 2020. Huh. Who writes this stuff? Funny, it&#x27;s Jim Jagielski, the same guy I was addressing six years ago.<p>Try to avoid caring whether people are incompetent or liars, you will find it difficult to tell which is which, so if you ensure you can treat both the same you needn&#x27;t distinguish. In this case I needn&#x27;t worry about whether Jim was too stupid to know what the problem was in 2016 or just didn&#x27;t care.

Apache has a few good projects and so much abandonware it’s very difficult to know which to avoid entirely.<p>At this point I think Apache has about 15 different data streaming&#x2F;queueing&#x2F;event processing systems.

I see a lot of blah blah blah below, but none of it gets to the crux of the matter, and that is LibreOffice is klunky.<p>I used to have it installed, because I had installed it for my father-in-law and I was his tech support (he passed a couple years ago).<p>The API in Writer is a mess. Okay? I am sure I&#x27;ll get some people sqawking for be saying that out loud, but I also know a bunch of you will be nodding in agreement.<p>And don&#x27;t get me started on Calc.<p>Lets get another thing clear, I don&#x27;t love Microsoft Word. I don&#x27;t. But then, my original experience writing documentation was in nroff&#x2F;troff using Writer&#x27;s Workbench. Then later, TeX. But the truth is, through work, or school, a ton of people have become accustomed to be productive in Word.<p>And Excel is simply Superior to Calc in every way.<p>And yes, Microsoft is up to their old tricks, the bastards. We all know it. I mean, WSL2 was pretty good in Windows 10, but OMG WSL2 in Windows 11 competely rules. Native Linux USB support. Wow. That is some wicked bundling there. And then, if you have a family, Office 365, just for the fact that you can hand it out to a total of five other people, and you each get 1TB of cloud storage. For $99 per year. Again, wicked sneaky bundling. Six instances of 1TB cloud for $99? We only use five here, so $20 each, per year, for 1TB of cloud. Oh yeah, you get to use Office 365 if you want, as well.<p>So year, Microsoft pulls under handed market bundling.<p>But that doesn&#x27;t excuse the fact that LibreOffice is Klunky. Now that I no longer have to support it, I don&#x27;t miss it at all.

(shrug) I still use OpenOffice 4.1.5 day to day on windows 10, with no issues...didn&#x27;t know about any controversy.

Wow, didn&#x27;t realise StarOffice started in 1985.

Online office apps have an edge WRT collaboration. It may well be that the era of the standalone office suite is reaching its end.<p>What would it take to make LibreOffice a web-centric app companies could host themselves? Maybe Apache&#x27;s resources could be directed that way.

Because of what’s been highlighted in this article I found it super difficult to figure out a good alternative to MS Office, so agree 100% with the article. Now a happy LibreOffice user.

It&#x27;s not dead. I use it. Not that I dev for it though.

Trademarks. Contracts. Egos. I was there when it all happened. When Oracle refused to transfer the trademarks to the Document Foundation. When loud voices on many sides shouted at each other. Leading to the current situation. My current position: Who cares. ODF and Libre Office&#x27;s community managed to move forward. Let the ASF have their Open Office.

If trends are telling, as the author seems to think, they tell of Libre&#x27;s decline, too.<p>One thing I noticed is that the web based MS Office products are significantly snappier and less quirky than their desktop counterparts. Maybe that is part of it?<p>Unrelated: I also noticed that Visio, which I previously found quite pleasant to use, actually is nigh unusable (Desktop - no web version exists). Was it always this bad and have my standards simply gone up, or did it deteriorate?

This is what scares me: a FOSS project maintained by a corporation. I tend to install FOSS because imo they are more &quot;future-proof&quot;, but some of them are developed by companies (e.g., Fedora Linux) and that makes me wonder if they&#x27;re truly future-proof.

And apache has sunsetted a LOT of projects to it&#x27;s &quot;attic&quot;.<p>It even seems it usually is pretty aggressive in doing so.<p>Maybe there isn&#x27;t even a person in charge of the project to make the decision anymore, or it&#x27;s an Oracle employee whose job it is to NOT sunset it.

Why did you even post this? The last release was in May of 2022, not 2017!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openoffice.apache.org&#x2F;downloads.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openoffice.apache.org&#x2F;downloads.html</a>

Because the Apache Foundation is a graveyard for open source projects.

Because of all the organic internet traffic it brings them. Hey, stay awhile, maybe use one of their ML&#x2F;AI projects and donate some money too!

I imagine that part of this is due to the nature in which it was donated by Oracle to Apache. Legally obligating it’s continued distribution

Probably Oracle didn&#x27;t want to cooperate. It&#x27;s irrelevant though? Anyone who cares works with LibreOffice anyway.

My issue with OpenOffice&#x2F;LibreOffice is, that it&#x27;s stuck in the past, which makes me prefer using Google Sheets.

I&#x27;ve always assumed when projects go under the Apache.org umbrella, that is where they go to die.

The &quot;LibreOffice&quot; name doesn&#x27;t help. Not that many people would be able to spell that on first hearing.<p>Libber-what? Lib Re-Office?

Someone should fork LibreOffice every time there&#x27;s a new release, and re-package it with a better name.

&gt; but that doesn&#x27;t mean that they&#x27;re unfounded<p>Yes, yes it does. The very definition of unfounded is having no foundation or basis in facts. That&#x27;s some &quot;stolen election&quot;-level logic.

Is it me or the second picture or whatever that is doesn’t load?

&gt; Its last major release was version 4.1, from 2014!<p>Oh we are playing major version minor version!<p>Let me try: Libreoffice is only at version 7.3 ! That makes it hundreds of versions behind office365! Proof once again that free software has no business competing with software build by professional commercial developers. Now excuse me while I try to reboot my futuristic Windows 2000. &#x2F;s<p>Versions may as well be marketing names for most software. If anyone even mentions them I might as well assume a minor case of serious brain damage. Java just flat out dropped the leading 1, Firefox is in the low hundreds, some software just goes year&#x2F;moth.<p>As Apache office still releases updates I find the claim that it is dead highly misleading, but that is presumably the intention if the post.