OpenOffice, after years of neglect, could shut down

jeremy · 09-06-2016, 03:10 PM

Quote:

As LibreOffice soars, OpenOffice management considers retiring the project.

OpenOffice, once the premier open source alternative to Microsoft Office, could be shut down because there aren't enough developers to update the office suite. Project leaders are particularly worried about their ability to fix security problems.

An e-mail thread titled, "What would OpenOffice retirement involve?" was started yesterday by Dennis Hamilton, vice president of Apache OpenOffice, a volunteer position that reports to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) board.

"It is my considered opinion that there is no ready supply of developers who have the capacity, capability, and will to supplement the roughly half-dozen volunteers holding the project together," Hamilton wrote.

No decisions have been made yet, but Hamilton noted that "retirement of the project is a serious possibility," as the Apache board "wants to know what the project's considerations are with respect to retirement."
Few updates and a lingering security hole

Many developers have abandoned OpenOffice to work on LibreOffice, a fork that got its first release in January 2011. While LibreOffice issues frequent updates, OpenOffice's most recent version update was 4.1.2 in October 2015. That was the only OpenOffice release in 2015, and there were only two updates in all of 2014. LibreOffice got 14 version updates in 2015 alone.

In July, OpenOffice issued an advisory about a security vulnerability that had no fix. The problem could let attackers craft denial-of-service attacks and execute arbitrary code. One of the workarounds suggested by the OpenOffice project was to use LibreOffice or Microsoft Office instead. A patch for that problem that can be applied to existing versions of OpenOffice was released in late August, but concerns about fixing future security problems remain.

Though the vulnerability didn't become public until recently, Hamilton wrote that the problem and a proof of concept was reported to the OpenOffice team just as version 4.1.2 was about to be released. Developers figured out a source code fix in March this year, but "we were sitting on the fix because we didn't want to give anyone ideas when they saw it applied to the source code unless there was a release in the works," Hamilton wrote.

OpenOffice became an open source project in 2000 after Sun Microsystems acquired StarOffice and released the code. The LibreOffice fork was created after Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2010. After the fork, Oracle contributed OpenOffice to the ASF, which renamed it Apache OpenOffice.

LibreOffice is maintained by The Document Foundation, whose advisory board includes free software groups such as the Free Software Foundation and GNOME and companies such as Canonical, Google, and Red Hat. The existence of LibreOffice is fortunate because it provides OpenOffice users new features and a likely more secure alternative to switch to. LibreOffice is already the default office suite on major Linux distributions, and it has more than 100 million active users.

But OpenOffice still has plenty of users on Windows and Mac in part due to name recognition resulting from its long history. OpenOffice was downloaded more than 29 million times in 2015, for a cumulative total of more than 160 million downloads since May 2012, according to project statistics.

More at Ars...

What do LQ members think?

--jeremy

Timothy Miller · 09-06-2016, 03:13 PM

Can't remember when I last used OpenOffice. Libreoffice is faster, more compatible with M$ Office, has more features. Just in every way a superior piece of software, so IMO, there's no reason to keep OpenOffice around. I would never use it again unless LibreOffice folded, so get rid of it and any non-paid developers they have can help with making LibreOffice better.

agillator · 09-06-2016, 05:45 PM

There is a lesson to be learned there, too. As I remember, LibreOffice was forked off (created) because Oracle basically told the volunteer developers they weren't running the show, weren't particularly valued, would be allowed to continue working on OpenOffice at Oracle's pleasure, and whatever. In other words Oracle seriously alienated the volunteers in some way or other, or so the story goes. So, the volunteers set out to create LibreOffice and the Document Foundation and the rest, as they say, is history. Something about biting the hand that feeds you?

frankbell · 09-06-2016, 09:02 PM

And, if recall, once Oracle realized that they could not find a way to squeeze any money out of OOo, they spun it off to the Apache Foundation. By then, the damage had been done.

marinegundoctor · 09-06-2016, 10:24 PM

I think they should retire it. Cause of death: Oracle. I remember way back when it was top 'o the line but then Oracle ruined it...or perhaps that was the best thing since it ultimately resulted in LibreOffice.

ReaperX7 · 09-12-2016, 08:42 PM

Oracle has ruined many things. OpenSolaris and now OpenOffice. The funny part is, the spin off projects are doing well. OpenIndiana developed the Illumos core and sponsored OpenZFS development across numerous UNIX-like systems and the Apache Foundation and Document Foundation helped get LibreOffice going.

My old instructor from college was right. Oracle is nothing but a company eating machine, and apparently all it produces is poo.