Disclaimer: ex AOO-PMC (Project Management Committee) here. I left the project on December 2013, though. If you want to see my background story,
check this article
orangeli wrote:@AOOisdead
What a sad chart.
Microsoft is a platinum sponsor of the ASF.
There is no need to feed conspiracy “theories:” one good thing about the “Apache way” is that only people, not organizations, can vote on projects, so it’s a “one person one vote” system. The fact that MS is a platinum sponsor for Apache has no relation with the situation of the AOO project because no AOO-PMC is a MS employee. And of course, that means that the current situation of the AOO project is a direct consequence of its PMC (lack of) activity, nobody else should be blamed for that. In fact, how the AOO-PMC has (not) reacted to real problems was the main reason why I (and other people) resigned back then.
So yes, the AOO is in a sorry state and the graphic showing mailing list activity is really sad, but unfortunately is not unexpected. When a few years ago Denis Hamilton started the discussion about the possibility of retiring AOO many accused him of talking “too soon,” but in my opinion that warning arrived too late and nobody in the project was willing to understand it.
AOO is managing to release a few (late) bug fixes, so it’s still moving, somehow. I think that the fate of AOO is not “dead,” but something worst: oblivion. And I think that’s a worst fate because the project will drag behind it a lot of unaware users relying on the history of the OpenOffice brand.
Honestly, and it makes me sad to say this, I see no reason to still use AOO. The myth that LibO is unstable is now false: if you remain with the “still” branch, it works pretty well. And yes, there are things that are wrong in LibO (Writer’s default template is just stupid), but nothing that’s a real problem (they finally fixed the silly behavior of Navigator’s tree view!).
The “fact” that licenses allow LibO to pick code from AOO but not the other way round seems to be a myth too: a developer told me that the code base has diverged enough to make it almost impossible to apply an AOO patch to the LibO code tree. And let’s be honest: when was the last time AOO added an interesting feature?
So in the time AOO barely managed to offer a couple of bug fix releases, LibO refactored its UI, providing more options (menus and toolbars are still the default, people!), added OpenType support, updated Graphite support (AOO is not able to manage the “latest” —from 2014!— versions of SIL fonts) in a way that can also be used in mac, next version will add discrete Fourier transforms to Calc… I mean, you see the point.
If AOO fulfill all your needs, that’s OK, but be aware that LibO will fulfill them too… and probably Abiword and Gnumeric, but that’s another point.
I would love to have some other free office suite at the same level of LibO. Calligra was promising, but it also failed. Oh well.
There are two types of people: those who believe that there are two types of people and those who do not.
openSUSE Leap with KDE Plasma / LibreOffice