Re: [libreoffice-users] Demise of Open Office

Hi John,

John Gregson schrieb:
> I am an older person, with limited computer knowledge, using Open Office
> 3.3; on Win 7.
> Would some Kind Soul please explain why Open Office seems to be fading
> away.

When Oracle bought Sun it got the rights on OpenOffice.org among other 
things. But Oracle had no interest to develop OpenOffice.org. It shuts 
down the development department and dismissed the developers. Oracle 
gave Apache the possibility to do further work on OpenOffice.org. But 
parts of OpenOffice.org are not compatible with the Apache license. So 
the current work is to identify those parts and replace them with Apache 
license compatible solutions. In addition, OpenOffice.org was not only a 
product but had a lot of infrastructure around like Wiki, Bugzilla, 
mailinglists and forums, which Apache tries to migrate to the way Apache 
works. So it will last some time till the next release will appear and 
it will no longer be an "OpenOffice.org" but an "Apache OpenOffice". For 
more information see for example 
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/OpenOffice.org+Migration+Status

Apache is not an enterprise but a foundation and does not employs 
developers but the work is done by volunteers. In this aspect it is 
similar with The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. There are 
enterprises which pay some developers (including some of the old stuff) 
to work full time on the Apache OpenOffice. That is similar to the 
situation here, where some enterprises pay developers to work full time 
on LibreOffice. The latter had worked already on the OpenOffice.org code 
for a long time and LibreOffice gets all of their know-how. The fact, 
that lot of the volunteers of OpenOffice.org work now on LibreOffice has 
been told already.

> In Open office, I use Writer and Calc; I assume that the OOo files are
> compatible with Libre Office. Should I start using Libre Office
> immediately? Please keep abbreviations to a minimum., or at least
> explain the abbreviation.

You can start immediately with LibreOffice. There are some versions 
available parallel. The version with the higher second number has got 
new features but might contain some more bugs. The version with the 
smaller second number does not have the latest features but has got a 
lot of bug fixes already and is in use a long time by many users.

Kind regards
Regina





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