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Comment by novok | Hacker News Reader

For people not very familiar with the open vs libre office split, are they more different nowadays? Is libre office the better package?

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Back in 2016 Apache OpenOffice's PMC chair Dennis Hamilton proposed the idea of retiring the project (that's what Apache does to dead software projects).

Inevitably there was pushback from that community saying actually everything is fine, it's crazy to talk about retirement. Here's what I wrote in an LWN comment at that time:

> For example, shipping AOO 4.2 in 10 weeks at ApacheConEU. That's not crazy. Libreoffice goes from feature freeze to release in 10 weeks. A healthy AOO development community should be able to do it, or come so close as to leave no-one in any doubt.

I wrote that in September 2016. Hamilton is long gone and we're now much closer to 200 weeks than 10 weeks. AOO 4.2 still hasn't shipped. The "new" feature release they hope to release "later this year" (but they have said that most years) is stuff that wasn't cutting edge in 2016.

It's like Monty Python's Black Knight, refusing to admit defeat long after it ceases to be relevant. "It's just a scratch".

This is, unfortunately, standard practice for the ASF. After Google shut down Wave in late 2010, they donated the code to the ASF; the project [1] sat largely inactive in the Apache Incubator until finally being shut down in 2018.

If you poke around in Apache's project list [2], you'll easily find other projects which followed a similar trajectory -- a few months, maybe a year of activity, followed by years of neglect.

[1]: http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html

[2]: https://www.apache.org/index.html#projects-list

I believe OpenOffice is more or less dead at this point, with their last feature release coming in 2014.

The OpenOffice people will probably still tell you the project is not dead. However, they have been almost incapable of making releases for the past few years. If you look at their code repo, there are an order of magnitude more commits going into LibreOffice (maybe multiple orders). I admire their tenacity but at some point the right thing to do was to hand over the Open Office name over to LibreOffice. The war has been over for years and LibreOffice won.

I can't think of any reason one would remain motivated to work on OpenOfice. What could possibly be the point?

They're still being paid? :-)

Good point, then we should send my questions to the bosses. ;)

Absolutely. Libre Office is updated far more often.

It's also installed by default in many Linux desktop distributions.

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