3 ms·

AOO IS NOT MAINTAINED. It can't do builds, it can't make releases. It can't apply a security bug fix and build a release within 9 months. For an office suite, t

by ploxiln 10y ago

AOO IS NOT MAINTAINED. It can't do builds, it can't make releases. It can't apply a security bug fix and build a release within 9 months. For an office suite, that's not OK. LO is where all the active OpenOffice developers went to, LO is the continuation of OO.o. AOO is an old and unmaintained snapshot of OpenOffice, with an apparently long-broken release build process. I don't think there should be just one office suite, or even just one open source office suite, and I don't think everyone should just use the one with the most features. Not at all. But the AOO situation is just tricking people unfamiliar with it, to use the OO.o from 3 years ago instead of the OO.o with security and other fixes, and updates for compatibility with new operating systems (and new features which may or may not be desired). If you hate LO developers or project, maybe you have some good reasons, and you should be able to work on a competitor based on whatever open-source code base you want. But the right thing to do at this point is abandon the "OpenOffice" name. Random people looking for "OpenOffice" need to be confronted with the fact that there are now two forks, LibreOffice and something else. And, at least for today, they should definitely choose LibreOffice.

mindcrime 10y ago
it can't make releases. We're working on a 4.1.3 release right now. Yes, the project has had its issues, yes there's been adversity. But we'll fight through it and come out better in the end.
- cesarb 10y ago
  > > it can't make releases. > We're working on a 4.1.3 release right now. Sorry, but I saw that before. The last time people said AOO couldn't make releases, they made a herculean effort and managed to make one release (4.1.2 IIRC). And here they are again, struggling to make a release. I'll believe it not when they say "look, we made a release", but when they show the ability to do so consistently.
zanny 10y ago
The real, non-political competitor to the OpenOffice lineage has always been Calligra[1]. It sees dramatically less development, but it is also one of the KDE related projects that has a knack for using its toolkit to dramatically reduce its own code bloat - what takes hundreds of thousands of lines of reinventing the wheel in OO/LO is several hundred lines of extremely well maintained Qt data structures. Even when the zombie AOO dies it does not mean the end to competition in the free office suite space. Even beyond Calligra there are some Gnome based efforts and third party projects (including web based ones) that provide similar tools. There is no shortage of competition, and if there were ever a slowdown in LO we would just see another fork akin to the Oracle escape. https://www.calligra.org https://www.calligra.org
- smellf 10y ago
  > Calligra That webpage though. If I told my aunt to download Calligra she would have no idea what to do once she got there. You have to click the tiny "Get Calligra" in the upper right, then scroll down and click "For MS Windows" in the middle of a list, then read through a list to find the download that's actually Calligra, then download the right msi for your architecture. Compare that to openoffice.org, and then to libreoffice.org, and watch the page get better and better for aunts everywhere. > several hundred lines of extremely well maintained Qt data structures Sounds amazing to me, I may try it out too. But people who aren't tech literate and are looking for a free alternative to MS Office know OO.org, and that's the real crux of the issue - OO.org is effectively dead. If OO.org instead redirected to libreoffice.org with a little disclaimer, more people would be using better free software. The OO.org codebase isn't going anywhere. But Apache has a responsibility to its users and its reputation, and IMHO they should redirect the OO.org domain to LO.org, and let the community decide if the original OO.org codebase is worth resurrecting.

by ploxiln 10y ago

mindcrime 10y ago

it can't make releases. We're working on a 4.1.3 release right now. Yes, the project has had its issues, yes there's been adversity. But we'll fight through it and come out better in the end.

cesarb 10y ago
> > it can't make releases. > We're working on a 4.1.3 release right now. Sorry, but I saw that before. The last time people said AOO couldn't make releases, they made a herculean effort and managed to make one release (4.1.2 IIRC). And here they are again, struggling to make a release. I'll believe it not when they say "look, we made a release", but when they show the ability to do so consistently.

zanny 10y ago

The real, non-political competitor to the OpenOffice lineage has always been Calligra[1]. It sees dramatically less development, but it is also one of the KDE related projects that has a knack for using its toolkit to dramatically reduce its own code bloat - what takes hundreds of thousands of lines of reinventing the wheel in OO/LO is several hundred lines of extremely well maintained Qt data structures. Even when the zombie AOO dies it does not mean the end to competition in the free office suite space. Even beyond Calligra there are some Gnome based efforts and third party projects (including web based ones) that provide similar tools. There is no shortage of competition, and if there were ever a slowdown in LO we would just see another fork akin to the Oracle escape. https://www.calligra.org https://www.calligra.org

smellf 10y ago
> Calligra That webpage though. If I told my aunt to download Calligra she would have no idea what to do once she got there. You have to click the tiny "Get Calligra" in the upper right, then scroll down and click "For MS Windows" in the middle of a list, then read through a list to find the download that's actually Calligra, then download the right msi for your architecture. Compare that to openoffice.org, and then to libreoffice.org, and watch the page get better and better for aunts everywhere. > several hundred lines of extremely well maintained Qt data structures Sounds amazing to me, I may try it out too. But people who aren't tech literate and are looking for a free alternative to MS Office know OO.org, and that's the real crux of the issue - OO.org is effectively dead. If OO.org instead redirected to libreoffice.org with a little disclaimer, more people would be using better free software. The OO.org codebase isn't going anywhere. But Apache has a responsibility to its users and its reputation, and IMHO they should redirect the OO.org domain to LO.org, and let the community decide if the original OO.org codebase is worth resurrecting.