Is there a future for OpenOffice?

The Apache Software Foundation made OpenOffice a high-level project, but is it enough to make it truly competitive? And should OpenOffice remain an independent open source project? We will try to answer these questions in the article below.

A few days ago, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced that Apache OpenOffice had gone out of development in Apache Incubator to become a high-level full-fledged project (Top-Level Project, TPL). This is great, of course, but is it enough to make OpenOffice truly competitive, especially considering that LibreOffice uses almost the same core? “The release of OpenOffice to free floating is an official recognition of the viability of the project, both in technical and in public matters. “The Apache Path” and its methods, such as public discussion of each decision with full transparency of all processes, allowed the project not only to successfully attract new volunteers, but also to elect a whole Committee of Project Managers that will ensure the stable development of Apache OpenOffice, ”says Vice OpenOffice President Andrea Pescetti (Andrea Pescetti). To be honest, the logic of this statement is not very clear.

No, really, why? Yes, OpenOffice was an important open source project, but the key word here was “was.” When Star Division was created in the 90s (it was then called Star Office), it was really a promising open source office suite. Then, after Star Division was absorbed by Sun in 1999 , the transformation in OpenOffice for many years made the project one of the most significant office suites.

But Sun neglected the project, and after Oracle bought Sun in 2009, the developers of the original OpenOffice, who were not very pleased with their previous work, began to use the source code of the project to create a new product - LibreOffice. They would gladly have agreed to work with Oracle, only Oracle didn’t want anything to do with LibreOffice, or, as it turned out soon, with OpenOffice. In late May 2011, Oracle abandoned OpenOffice.
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Meanwhile, LibreOffice was doing better than ever. Major Linux developers, such as, for example, Ubuntu, have recognized LibreOffice as their main office suite. Other companies, from Intel to the Free Software Foundation, also supported Office.

IBM, which initially supported OpenOffice by all means, has now switched to its own product, Symphony. IBM software architect Rob Weir, however, states: “IBM took the resources that she invested in Symphony and invested them in Apache OpenOffice. We also hired a development team from Hamburg, who worked on OpenOffice at Sun and, therefore, has a decade of experience with the right code. They have been working on Apache projects since last October, as well as their colleagues from Symphony. We invest a lot of intangible resources in the project: programmers, interface developers and other specialists. ” Indeed, OpenOffice Apache is still improving, but most of the improvements seem to come from the LibreOffice database. But why, then, continue to work on OpenOffice? I do not understand at all.

If you look closely at the plans for OpenOffice and LibreOffice for the next versions, you will notice that they are exactly the same: the best Office 2007-2013, support for the OpenXML format, versions for tablets and clouds.

Meanwhile, after years of resistance, Microsoft is finally starting to support Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 with the ability to read, modify and save files through Office 2013. This means that the final MS Office format will finally appear. , OpenOffice and LibreOffice with full support. If Microsoft succeeds, LibreOffice and OpenOffice will become much more attractive to end users.

I have one modest suggestion: maybe, instead of wasting time and effort on duplicating the work, Apache should team up with The Document Foundation, the parent organization of LibreOffice and start working together on a single office suite? Will this be better for all the developers and users of OpenOffice and LibreOffice? I think it will. And you?

UPD : It turns out one of the users, not so long ago, compared three office suites here . The results of these tests show that OpenOffice is not doing so badly, despite the failure of Oralce from this product.