Open Letter to Apache OpenOffice
Today marks 20 years since the source code to OpenOffice was released. And today we say: LibreOffice is the future of OpenOffice. Let’s all get behind it!
It’s great to have a rich and diverse set of free and open source software projects. Hundreds of millions of people around the world have benefited from the choice and customisation that they bring. But sometimes, users can lose out when they’re not aware of newer alternatives, or when one brand overshadows another.
OpenOffice(.org) – the “father project” of LibreOffice – was a great office suite, and changed the world. It has a fascinating history, but since 2014, Apache OpenOffice (its current home) hasn’t had a single major release. That’s right – no significant new features or major updates have arrived in over six years. Very few minor releases have been made, and there have been issues with timely security updates too.
In recent years, almost all development activity has taken place in LibreOffice, with 13 major releases and 87 minor releases. In 2019, LibreOffice had over 15,000 code commits, while OpenOffice had only 595. LibreOffice has a flourishing community, yearly conferences, professional support options, development and migration certification, and a robust commercial ecosystem.
In addition, LibreOffice has integrated many features essential for end users in 2020:
- Export in Microsoft Office OOXML formats (.docx, .xlsx etc.)
- ODF, OOXML and PDF signing for improved security
- Major performance improvements in Calc, the spreadsheet
- A fresh new NotebookBar user interface
- …and a lot more
But still, many users don’t know that LibreOffice exists. The OpenOffice brand is still so strong, even though the software hasn’t had a significant release for over six years, and is barely being developed or supported.
If Apache OpenOffice still wants to maintain its old 4.1 branch from 2014, sure, that’s important for legacy users. But the most responsible thing to do in 2020 is: help new users. Make them aware that there’s a much more modern, up-to-date, professionally supported suite, based on OpenOffice, with many extra features that people need.
We appeal to Apache OpenOffice to do the right thing. Our goal should be to get powerful, up-to-date and well-maintained productivity tools into the hands of as many people as possible. Let’s work together on that!
Signed,
The Board of Directors at The Document Foundation
Update: Discussion on Reddit and LWN
I really wish ppl weren’t so hostile towards LO … They’ve listed so many problems that it’s borderline unbelievable.
those people who are complaining seem to think that LO is from a big company or something smh.
there was someone on Windows XP asking for support… someone asking for read aloud and dictation, which is rather difficult for an open source project…
Libre office is winning
MS Office is winning. Sadly. OO and LO are both dead horses, just the first seems more dead then the other.
While I definitely prefer Linux over Windows, it’s the opposite for LO and O365 and I use all these on a daily basis. The O365 suite has become improved drastically since MS has started to listen to its customers.
>The O365 suite has become improved drastically since MS has started to listen to its customers.
wow. which parallel universe are you from. can you take me there? ms office still has basic issues. try hovering over the UI of an inactive windows and watch the broken hover states and annoying tooltips.
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace do well because they are cloud solutions. Google Workspace’s web apps compares to Microsoft’s downloaded apps (their web apps suck). They have great collaboration features. But they’re from massive as companies and are super proprietary. LO cannot do that.
and there’s no ms office for linux 🙁
>try hovering over the UI of an inactive windows and watch the broken hover states and annoying tooltips.
-opens Excel
-makes inactive
-hovers
-sees everything function as expected, without broken hover states and no tooltips appearing when inactive.
Looks like they fixed it.
In “digital time” six years are almost as a century of legacy time, so it’s about time.
Apache Foundation: Please do the right thing. Humankind will thank you.
That’s the correct conversation to be having, Open Office is still a very strong brand. LibeOffice is not the best term to use in English speaking countries, there is always confusion between gratis and libre.
I sometimes think however that the board of the TDF make things worse for themselves, I don’t see a strategic path ahead, it just appears things get done randomly. Also something needs to change with the branding of the personal / community edition. It is very much needed, people need to appreciate that things don’t come about for free. Wishing wont make it happen.
Hopefully a situation will come about where TDF starts to fund essential development work on essential areas needed as I understand now that development is not in the remittance of the foundation and conducted by their ecosystem partners.
LibreOffice is the best office in the world! Our school in Moscow moved from MSO to LO and we all love the changes! Many thanks to devs for great alternative! 🙂
This announcement is long overdue. It should be a FAQ.
Thank you I am very glad to finally have some clarity on this. I have never been sure of which version I should be installing or what the differences were. My preferred distro installs the Libre version by default so that is mostly — but not always — what I have gone with.
I don’t pretend to understand the politics of what happened to cause the split, but it sounds like OpenOffice has become yet another example of Abandonware.
Unfortunately there is a very dark side to Open Source Software such as the debacle of PHP and what happened to FFMPEG. But I guess it’s still much better than the shenanigans of Microsoft.
There is just way too much buggy kraptastic garbage software out there, both commercial and free. LibreOffice is a notable and commendable exception, I’ve had very few problems with it, especially lately.
The Libre name really is very problematic though, it is difficult to spell and clumsy to pronounce. If the Apache people were to be true gentlemen (and women) they would set their ego’s aside and do the right thing and hand the OO name over to you.
oracle wanted to use contributions to openoffice in their commercial software. The people contributing for free said no to oracles new terms , we will fork with go-open office instead and create, LibreOffice. There were almost zero contibutions to Oracle after this
Why Apache Foundation being so? Did Oracle pay them to kill OpenOffice?
Great news. Yes give users a great software piece that competes with M$ office. I think merging two projects can rise some donation possibilites.
Please don’t put LibreOffice Base and Draw behind. Without a desktop RDBMS an office suite is just a toy. Look at M$ they have Access, Visio, Publisher, Foxpro, Sql Server/Tools, M$ Query, Power Query, BI etc.. etc..
Thanks
To be fair, this makes no sense. open office is already did, so this news is aimed to take away
only the branding? What for? People will eventually leave behind open office anyway, simply
because nobody maintains it anymore.
LibreOffice has around 200M users, we estimate, but plenty of people still have no idea that LibreOffice exists (or that OpenOffice is barely maintained). Even after all these years. I still go into schools and other places and see OpenOffice – and users battling with the ancient versions. When they learn that there’s a much more up-to-date and well-maintained successor, they’re super happy. We need to help more people like that – hence this open letter.
Hi Mike,
In my eyes the only way we can achieve what you talk demand in the OpenLetter is a reunification of both projects. I talked with Michael Meeks in 2018 (I am not sure anymore. The last time OpenOffice got invited to a dinner) on FOSDEM, if we could merge both Projects again. He did not see any way that this could happen again.
I do not see that this situation has changed in a better direction. The OpenLetter is indeed a refexion of this view, since you could have reached out to us easily through various known channels. And we could have exchanged positions and tried to find acceptable ways to all of us.
Both projects are divided by code, license and emotions. The emotional component is the one that is the most difficult to overcome. This is not about who is the more popular or the better Office suite or the more capable.
If you are really interested in resolving the fragmentation issue you talk about you will have to work with us to enlarge the common base of the two Projects again. We need to emotionally grow back together after a long time where OpenOffice was the hate target.
The code and the impressive LibreOffice achievements are irrelevant in this topic. We do what we can, and it is clear that pro bono community volunteers have much less power to move code then employed people who get payed to do so. There is a nice email again from Michael Meeks that points this out within the LO community.
In my humble opinion a merge is the only way that the ultimate goal OpenLetter can be addressed. And it will be hard very hard to do. Are you up for what it takes to achieve this?
All the Best
Peter Kovacs
P.S. / personal note: I write this as my personal opinion. I have joined thge OpenOffice project in 2016 in favor of LibreOffice, because of developer need within OpenOffice. I took the chairman position at the end of 2017 and we rotated the seat in 2019.
Hi Peter (as you addressed your comment to me),
Just to say, there’s no “demand” here. It’s politely asking to let people know that there’s a much more up-to-date and well maintained successor to OpenOffice(.org) out there. Isn’t that in the interests of everyone? For instance, I still come across Apache OpenOffice 4.1 in schools and other places. People are struggling with lack of features (especially OOXML export) and other problems.
Every single time, they are overjoyed when they try LibreOffice and realise there’s a much more advanced and well-supported suite out there. (And they’re often really angry that AOO didn’t inform them about that.)
Please just help me understand: If you genuinely care about getting good software out to the masses, what is wrong with letting your users know about LibreOffice? If you want to maintain the old 4.1 branch, fine, but what is actually wrong with helping new users get something with the features they really need?
Mike
Hi Mike,
I am sorry. I have no demand in doing your sales. And I find it quite toxic if you tell people that it is my fault they did not do proper software selection.
When I am ask for helping users in their Software selection of course I do give a honest market overview to the best of my time and ability. And of course I do tell them that OpenOffice is not the tool of choice these days for OOXML. I do not know one person that denies that today with 4.1.7 in production.
However my focus is that OpenOffice user who are fine with OpenOffice, despite it lacks some features, that they can continue to use the software with a better safety and code quality. If you are not able to respect that I am sorry for you.
I am looking forward to the next opportunity where LibreOffice and OpenOffice can try to cooperate. When we are able to we ereally rock the show. I especially enjoyed the OpenRuhr, where we had the chance to introduce Libre and OpenOffice to the audience.
OpenSource always wins on cooperation, which you clearly do not want. We loose when we fight over shares, which is in my understanding your goal. See you at Fosdem or any other Open Source Con I manage to come. Looking forward, to the next chance both sister projects can cooperate. And I will keep trying.
All the best and bye bye
Peter
Hi Peter,
Sorry you find it “toxic” to kindly consider letting users know about alternatives, but I guess that’s as far as we can go. And I’m curious that you say OpenOffice has “better safety”, when you know very well that OpenOffice has had major problems delivering timely security updates to users over the years.
Anyway, see you at future events, and I hope one day we can all focus on getting the best tools into the hands of as many people as possible.
Regards,
Mike
Asking a “competitor” to promote your project is just silly. Surely you see that?
It’s not “promoting”. It’s just letting users know that alternatives exist. If I ran a FOSS project, and hadn’t made any significant updates since 2014, but someone else had taken the code and was doing awesome things with it – of course I’d let my users know. That would be the responsible thing to do. Why can’t we be responsible to our users, if we want to get the best FOSS into the hands of as many people as possible?
Yikes – I did a typo above and can not modify it now. 🙁 The commenting function here is weird …
totallly agree.
Time to bury OpenOffice.
R.I.P., better today than tomorrow!
I agree. I had to remotely login into a friend’s machine machine to help them resolve a computer issue, and I noticed that they were using OpenOffice. I asked them if were using OpenOffice deliberately instead of LibreOffice. They simply didn’t know what LibreOffice is. I wonder how many other people are in the same boat!
This kind of argument is really dangerous. Back in the day, when SUN freed StarOffice to OpenOffice, one of the conditions was that companies stop any development of Gnumeric.
At that time, Gnumeric was the best Spreadsheet software. It was an example for perfectly clean and documented code, it was efficient, it was stable, and it was so much ahead with regards to calculating mathematically correct and exact, that it was very popular in the science community. There were even scientific papers comparing statistical calculations between Gnumeric, Excel and the other competitors at the time.
Well, LO has just to take the ALv2 licence.
Merging these two projects on the single banner OpenOffice will a good idea.
Apache changed the licence at the request of IBM at that time. For the Open Office branch, it is too late.
Hi team, I ran into an issue with LibreOffice Writer and I wanted to know if there was a fix, or at least make the bug report, but I can’t find any contact information on your website, and the Facebook page doesn’t allow sending a message… I did see ask.libreoffice.org but it doesn’t allow attaching the file with the issue. Is there any way to communicate with you that allows attaching a document?
Hi David, for all bug reports please use the bug tracker: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org – You can attach files there. For more information on bug reporting: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugReport – And thanks for your help! Bug reports from the community are really appreciated.
what the faq?! Peter says “I have no demand in doing your sales.” in response to a letter to people still using OpenOffice. Open. Libre. Free. And you say sales? Peter, please do not do drugs while commenting on Document Foundation blog posts.
I don’t really know about OpenOffice or the drama involved honestly but it’s clear that LO is the successor and is definitely better.
Peter’s replies are very defensive, which may have caused some language problems. I think he meant the jab to be “I have no desire to do your sales” | “interest in doing” but whatever, the meaning comes through which translates to a user like me as “If you won’t subsume your project under mine, then too bad, so sad, go away.”
I used OO right through the forking of LO. I followed LO because 1) it rapidly became obvious that was where the development was going to happen and 2) I greatly appreciated the business philsophy of software freedom, ero “Libre” rather than obsessing about “free” as in no cost. AOO was a sharp break from the freedom concept, directly putting chains on developers which translates into less freedom for end users. Whatever the official canon, this is the history as I experienced it as a user.
It would be a mistake of historic proportions for LO to subjugate itself to OO after having built such a magnificent contribution. Instead we need, as a community of users, to redouble efforts to communicate. For institutional users there may be institutional communications opportunities. I personally will cogitate on this for a time and perhaps can finally return some contribution in that regard, being totally unable to use if-then in any language other then English (i.e. not #, not Go, no snakes, no fruit, no code, no how!)
Hello Mike,
Could you please tell me what tool you used to create the timeline release graphic in this post ?
I’m looking for a tool like this for a long time now.
Thank you in advance.
Hi there! The timeline is based on this public domain image, which is an SVG and can be edited in Inkscape etc.: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StarOffice_major_derivatives.svg
Rather than trying to work with (a still obviously heels-dug-in) Apache OpenOffice, consider instead:
1. Improving the name of the software.
As others have stated, “LibreOffice” is exceptionally problematic (linguistically) in English speaking countries. My clients (USA) are *invariably* confused initially when presented with “LibreOffice.”
“NextOffice” might be a good choice for a number of reasons: including linguistic ease across a number of Western languages and even being easy to pronounce (for most). It is also a subliminal “suggestion” of what platform one should use to move an IT infrastructure forward.
One minor potential downside is that there is a small Architectural practice in Iran using this name. However, they might like getting some name recognition. Also, there would likely be ZERO doubt about which entity does what.
There should, however, be some serious study and debate about a name change.
2. Making a HUGE effort to get the word out about “NextOffice.”
One good way of doing this is with schools (which then also seeds future business use). Such outreach is *conceptually* simple as there are databases of all schools (and their IT administrators) available in pretty much each developed country.
Unfortunately, in certain places (such as the USA) you would find that Google’s application suite now reigns supreme in education, making this a potentially difficult nut to crack in those places.
That said, huge amounts of tech blogging suggesting to “redecentralize,” self host, perform more work out of the *public* cloud, etc. may be helpful in making the case for widespread adoption of NextOffice.
The new antitrust case the US Dept. of Justice has recently undertaken also suggests a potential for another (especially a completely open-source) entrant in this space.
As contemporary schools tend to want to have centralized application hosting, TDF/LibreOffice/NextOffice should therefore also strenuously work on releasing a fully network-hosted capable version of the software. TDF could also host for schools (assuming some schools — that’s my experience in the USA) are too lazy of (claimed) “broke” to setup relevant server infrastructure themselves. This would be a huge undertaking; a logical partner *might* be NextCloud [my name suggestion would align NICELY!! ]
Best of luck moving TDF and its software platforms to the next level!
Or, y’know, you could just do a decent job of marketing your brand, and not expect OO to lie down and die just to make you happy. (Yes, I know, you say it’s already dead. But that’s not for you to say. It’s for the member of the project to decide. And they disagree.)
OO is an open source project. You may have heard of open source. It’s when volunteers work on something they care about. Apache exists as a place for open source projects to live, as long as they want to. It’s not Apache’s job to tell a project when and how to release updates. Can you imagine the outcry of Apache were to go around shutting down projects just because some other project declared themselves to be better?
You have a better product? Great. Get out there and spread the word. You don’t need OO’s permission to do that.
> not expect OO to lie down and die just to make you happy
Please don’t use strawman arguments – we didn’t say that at all. The open letter says, it’s fine if AOO wants to maintain the legacy 4.1 branch. But it’s also responsible to let users know about much more actively developed and up-to-date alternatives. If we in the FOSS world want to get the best tools out there, to the most people, we should let people know what exists.
It’s not about “promoting” LO or “winning”. LO is doing just fine. This is about doing the responsible thing for end users, letting them know what’s out there, so they can choose.