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Distribution: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu
Posts: 13,597
Rep:
Is OpenOffice Dying?
Quote:
Apache OpenOffice is not only in trouble, but is its own worst enemy as well.
In September 2014, rumors were flying that Apache OpenOffice was floundering and might soon merge with OpenOffice. The rumors were denied, but revived in March 2015 when Jonathan Corbett used development activity statistics to show that OpenOffice was seriously short of developers, and had corporate support only from IBM. Now, OpenOffice's most recent report to the Apache Foundation appears to reinforce these previous reports, and then some.
To be fair, the report is listed as "a working copy and not to be quoted." However, I am discussing it anyway for two reasons. First, much of the report was mentioned in earlier reports, which suggests that its information is accurate. Second, when I contacted Jan Iversen, the new OpenOffice Chair, three weeks ago, he gave the same warning even more strongly. Since then the contents has gone through at least one more draft, but with little change of content, which makes me suspect that the excuse is an effort to delay discussion of the content. If I am mistaken, the fact will eventually become obvious, since the report is, after all, a public document.
The report begins with the announcement that Jan Iversen has replaced Andrea Pescetti as project Chair. Accepting the report's claim that the change was made to rotate the Chair and that the transition was "smooth," this change is practically the most upbeat news given in the report.
By contrast, OpenOffice is trying to replace the release manger who recently resigned. A cynic might wonder about the implications of having to replace two key positions. Unsurprisingly, the report notes that work on the next release is "progressing slowly."
In fact, if the report has a theme, it is the lack of developers. More specifically, many project activities are progressing extremely slowly or else are delayed. These activities include:
Maybe if they hadn't forked OpenOffice, we didn't have LibreOffice today, nor did we have Apache OpenOffice!
That means Oracle wouldn't develop OpenOffice, and someday someone would fork it anyway. It's nice that they forked OpenOffice sooner and Go-oo developers joined them.
Last edited by ccSadegh; 05-01-2015 at 02:37 AM.
Reason: fixed grammar
Maybe if they hadn't forked OpenOffice, we didn't have LibreOffice today, nor did we have Apache OpenOffice!
That means Oracle wouldn't develop OpenOffice, and someday someone would fork it anyway. It's nice that they forked OpenOffice sooner and Go-oo developers joined them.
A single excellent product would have been more to my liking. If splits are really advantageous at least they should have waited longer.
Don't get me wrong: I appreciate all the thankless hard work that has gone into it but on the other hand I have spent many frustrating hours on some applications trying to do relatively simple things.
It could already have been so much better.
An example: Many years ago I used a database program called DBXL (a DBase clone). To this day I have not been able to find anything as good as it.
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