Apache OpenOffice 4.1.10 released. Apache OpenOffice For Windows will be easy to learn and use, especially if youre currently utilizing another office software package, as it will have a quite familiar feel. Apache OpenOffice For Windows is a free, Open Source MS Office alternative with a Word compatible word processor, a complete Excel compatible spreadsheet program, and more.
And as we all know it is not about just needing a developer or two to volunteer here, maintaining and developing something as large as OpenOffice is a huge undertaking and needs a very sizeable and dedicated community to be able to succeed.So dear Apache developers, for the sake of open source and free software, please recommend people to go and download LibreOffice, the free office suite that is being actively maintained and developed and which has the best chance of giving them a great experience using free software. And to be absolutely clear I am only suggesting this due to the stagnant state of the OpenOffice project, if OpenOffice had managed to build a large active community beyond the resources IBM used to provide then it would have been a very different story, but since that did not happen I don’t see any value to anyone involved to just let users keep downloading aging releases of a stagnant codebase until the point were bit rot chase them away or they hear about LibreOffice through mainstream media or friends. You may be new to office software, or you may be familiar. Letting users believe that OpenOffice is still alive and evolving is only damaging the general reputation of open source Office software among non-technical users and thus I truly believe that it would be in everyones interest to help the remaining OpenOffice users over to LibreOffice.Anyone who wants to get up to speed quickly with Apache OpenOffice will find this book valuable.
This last point means the code can be re-used by other Apache projects, which is by all means sufficient justification to keep the project in the Apache umbrella.Second, most of us don’t really like the direction LibreOffice is heading to. And most importantly it is fully under an unrestricted license. The new releases for Apache are smaller and much more stable than OpenOffice.org ever was. A lot of people are still using OpenOffice.org, which we consider inferior to Apache OpenOffice, but we can’t really force them to update. I am in the OpenOffice team in Apache and while I don’t pretend to talk for the Apache OpenOffice PMC, I will say quite openly that your proposal just won’t happen.First of all, we think Apache OpenOffice as released has been a huge success.
“Well the sidebar was basically one commit but it was pretty significant and it has been more than 1 year since that so you are counting very selectively.”Not really, a year is a large enough period to determine the vitality of a project. The ASF is indeed about processes if development in OpenOffice goes to a null level the project will be moved to the Attic.At this time we still have: 1) a group of developers that know the code very well but will never move to LibreOffice (for whatever reason) 2) resources in donated code that haven’t been ported to the current tree and 3) support infrastructure (Wiki, forum, websites).If AOO were to close and suddenly disappear, all those would go with it and, believe it or not, that would actually hurt all derivative projects including LibreOffice.1. I actively use Apache OpenOffice and it’s not like the product is unusable or seriously lacking functionality.In no case can the ASF endorse a project that is developed outside it’s umbrella and doesn’t respect the Apache brand.Apache Projects have ups and downs and the ASF has experience with such situations. Transferring OOo would be really complicated, would cause a lot of confusion, and would not really serve any purpose.While I do admit the development of Apache OpenOffice is falling short in many ways, we do have an active security team: there was security vulnerability announced with a workaround and a fix in the main tree. This is all good and we hope the best for the LibreOffice guys but it is not the approach most of us care about.Concerning the trademark, the ASF owns two trademarks : OpenOffice.org which is deprecated, and Apache OpenOffice.We obviously cannot transfer the “Apache OpenOffice” brand to a project that is not within the Apache Software Foundation. They did take all the code from Apache OpenOffice and that effectively means they relaxed the extreme copyleft that OpenOffice.org was using before it was moved into the ASF.
Apache Openoffice License Version 2
“The Document Foundation has no ownership of any code. Not sure why this is an argument for OpenOffice it was fair game, since the Apache license allowed such use.3. That happened a few years ago and they have already changed and cleaned the code significantly from the state it was when they relicensed. LibreOffice migrated from a strong copyleft license (GPL) to a weaker one (MPL) via the OpenOffice code (under the Apache license). “It just so happens that after a very brutal relicensing approach, practically all their code carries references to the Apache License version 2.”Well, yes. In the last year it has only shown strong sings of stagnation and lack of volunteers.2.
I submitted at least two reproducible bugs in Impress and nobody has done anything for a year. After all, there are backups ( */ */)As user of “OpenOffice” since it was StarOffice 5.0, I can say that Apache OO may have more neat features than OpenOffice.org (up to 3.4.1 or something), but OpenOffice.org doesn’t crash at the slightest problem, like OO 4.x.x. Most of the material has already been documented there.Even if those OpenOffice services were shut down, “leaving everyone in the dust” is terribly exaggerated. Shutting down the project would mean leaving everyone in the dust.”Fair point, there may be some chunks of useful information here and there, but:-> OpenOffice wiki suffers from ancient documentation from pre-Apache times that has not been updated, which means that users or developers cannot easily distinguish if the content is useful or deprecated.-> LibreOffice has created its own wiki and question asking forum years ago. A lot of the key documentation still remains in only the Wiki and the forums have been supporting both Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. “I was not referring about code contributions only though.
But there is a significant difference between asking LO developers to ALv2 their patches and LO refusing contributed patches that is also licensed under the ALv2. I don’t like it’s look and it has its share of bugs, but it doesn’t seem to crash all the time.Since there is no manpower to fix the innumerable bugs and the ever growing number of OS’s makes this more difficult, there is no point in keeping OO around except as a legacy, abandoned project for download as a curiosity.Whatever the reasons why LO and OO won’t/can’t merge, it’s a shame that the office suite field is left to propietary software that, must be admitted, works and IS supported.This seems to have been beaten to death. And the crash messages are meaningless for figuring out the reason, but they seem related to some kind of interference between the OS and OO handling of memory locations. The crash recovery feature is useless unless one sets it to save after EACH and every change. Because it will crash at any time, is a useless product.
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