Re: [libreoffice-users] Demise of Open Office

Hi :)
Lol, it was all very exciting and a bit turgid at the same time.  Still is, even tho things have 
calmed down a lot now apparently.  

The basic up-shot is that you don't need to change.  OpenOffice faded like the moon wanes and then 
waxes.  Hopefully under Apache it will wax towards being full again.  

You can choose to "jump ship" now and join the much more exciting and better developed LibreOffice 
now or you could choose to stick-it-out a bit longer and then choose to change (or not) at some 
point later on.  

Regards from
Tom :)


--- On Thu, 24/11/11, Regina Henschel <rb.henschel@t-online.de> wrote:

From: Regina Henschel <rb.henschel@t-online.de>
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Demise of Open Office
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Date: Thursday, 24 November, 2011, 19:18

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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