Outlining the OpenOffice project’s current standing, Hamilton said in the email that the project will evidently be shuttered if more developers can not be recruited to support it and ensure the security of software. The e-mail thread was titled an ominous sounding “What would OpenOffice retirement involve?” and several people had replied to it. While the software remains usable, many users are now anxious about the various security issues these lack of updates may cause. In fact, several vulnerabilities with OpenOffice that were pointed out by security experts remains unplugged at this point.
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For the uninitiated, here is a bit of history regarding OpenOffice.
Around 5 years ago there was an active movement to rid offices of Microsoft’s proprietary software, leading to the adoption of OpenOffice by many facilities, particularly government offices in Germany, with Munich being a prominent example. The first version of OpenOffice arrived in July 2002 and development on the product continued for nearly a decade – until 2011.
Hamilton’s concerns led to a lengthy discussion on the thread about what might happen if OpenOffice stopped development for good – such as where to archive the code, and how to box things up before bringing the curtain down.
“Now you know there will be a headline appearing in the next week, reading “Apache OpenOffice Mulls Retirement” or “Apache OpenOffice Begins To Wind Down”, etc”.
After OpenOffice came to them, the Apache Foundation then changed its name to Apache OpenOffice and continued the open source project as before. But developers have moved on to LibreOffice, and users have been following.
The Sun Microsystems open source productivity suite, now in the hands of the Apache Foundation, has suffered, at least in part, from the more organised LibreOffice forked from the original but being run on a more formalised release schedule. In the email, Hamilton disclosed the present status of the project. The arrival of free, web based office apps like Google Docs also didn’t help OpenOffice’s cause.
As a result, OpenOffice has become a solution that’s attracting only minimal developer interest, and this downward trend is confirmed by a recent security flaw that was patched only a month after it was discovered.
Now it seems recent calls for Apache OpenOffice project leaders to admit defeat and tell users to switch to the more popular LibreOffice, a fork of Apache OpenOffice, may soon be realised.
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Have you ever used OpenOffice in the past? Others even opted to simply pay for MS Office in order to gain the added security that the product provides. Do let us know your thoughts.
