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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

For some context, let's look at the read-only github mirrors of each project and see how much work has been done in the last 30 days on both projects.

LibreOffice - core: "Excluding merges, 106 authors have pushed 1,064 commits to master and 4,434 commits to all branches. On master, 4,833 files have changed and there have been 78,361 additions and 54,441 deletions."

https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/pulse/monthly

apache - openoffice: "Excluding merges, 4 authors have pushed 6 commits to trunk and 8 commits to all branches. On trunk, 16 files have changed and there have been 175 additions and 118 deletions."

https://github.com/apache/openoffice/pulse/monthly

tl;dr: OpenOffice had only 8 commits by 4 authors vs LibreOffice's 4,434 commits by 106 authors in the last month

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What are all those LO commits doing? I don't think they're adding new features. I compared the two calc codebases recently, and I found no new features in LO. I believe LO has consolidated the number of string classes internally, which is a nice bit of refactoring, but I can't think of any significant feature they've added to the spreadsheet app.

You often won't see the fruits of massive amounts of cleanup of technical debt, but you might eventually notice one being snappier or less glitchy. Such is the burden of software development.

> I don't think they're adding new features.

Wrong, tons of new features land in major releases. Here are the release notes for the feature-packed 5.0, released a few weeks ago: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.0

In addition to this, yes, refactoring is going on: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under-the-...

Thanks - that's interesting. It does look like Calc 5.0 has enhanced FLOOR( ) and CEILING( ) worksheet funcs for better MS Excel compatibility.

Or: LO has more commits on a typical weekday than AOO has had in 2015.

Didn't most people switch to LibreOffice anyway?

I mean that's only a loss of 4 authors for LibreOffice.

The problem discussed in the article is not the number of developers on the project, but the fact that, at least to the author of the open letter, users are still installing Open Office because that is what they always did. The author is asking the ASF to redirect requests for OpenOffice to the LibreOffice site so that users can use software that is being actively developed.

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