OpenOffice The Office Suite That Will Never End

Most of us in the FOSS world assume that OpenOffice is long discontinued, and it is at least it should be, but the repo is somehow still being kept a live with these weird fake commits.

==========Support The Channel==========

==========Resources==========

=========Video Platforms==========

==========Social Media==========

==========Credits==========
🎨 Channel Art:
Profile Picture:

#LibreOffice #Linux #OpenSource #FOSS #OpenOffice

🎵 Ending music
Track: Debris & Jonth - Game Time [NCS Release]
Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds.

DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase I may receive a small commission or other compensation.

[libreoffice-tdforg]

Hello from the LibreOffice project! 👋We're working on the next big update now, LibreOffice 7.6 – if anyone has suggestions or feedback, just let us know 😊

[stevehorne]

0:45 - OpenOffice was NOT "originally" Oracle OpenOffice. It was originally StarOffice, a commercial suite developed by Star Division, with roots going back to 1985 and Z80 and CP/M micros. Sun bought it near the end of the 1990s, for a while you could get it free from magazine cover disks, and a year later Sun released it as open source with the name OpenOffice. Oracle bought Sun in 2009 and that's precisely the trigger for the LibreOffice fork in 2010 - Sun had a very good reputation for open-source and otherwise open projects, Oracle has a much more closed reputation to say the least, many people hated the idea of Oracle having ultimate control of OpenOffice. There was also significant controversy around Java for the same reason. Oracle OpenOffice limped on for a while, and Apache OpenOffice was another fork which IIRC did some significant things at first but, as you say, is now long since dead. It's pretty rare for a fork to completely replace the original project it was based on, especially so quickly, so that says something about the strength of anti-Oracle feeling.

[LaSanya]

One reason that came up in my head on why those weird, small commits exist is that OpenOffice is now a magnet for young and very lazy devs to "farm" commits on a somewhat recognizable project for out-of-touch employers, to pep up their resume more than it actually is.

[brunothedev]

Oracle, after buying their way into a prosperous project: We do a little trolling

[yuvvrajkperson]

Last year I was forced to use openoffice in my university for a particular course. My teacher refused assignments from MSword, Gdocs, or Libre office (like she could tell??). Open office was by far the worst experience I had with a document software. It refused to print to pdf, had formatting issues with docx, AND EVEN ON odt FROM LIBRE OFFICE. It's the perfect target for linux and FOSS haters.

[immoloism]

Totally want to see that OpenOffice/StarOffice history lesson for a trip down memory lane.

[LordHonkInc]

Hearing that OpenOffice is to be considered a relic of times past and remembering first hearing about it as "the hot new contender facing off against Microsoft's titan that is Office" makes me feel like I just aged a thousand years in an instant. Man, gotta finally come to grips that 2002 wasn't just "a couple years ago." I mean, LibreOffice is only... 13 years old?!? Yeah, put me in the nursing home, I can literally feel the alzheimer's setting in 👴

[shaunpatrick]

"Originally Oracle OpenOffice..." Hey newbie, I've been using this thing since it was Star Office!

[wumwum]

I remember having to tell my teacher in 2021, that the new standard is libreoffice. There were many notices that the preferred document suite is libreoffice, OpenOffice was NEVER mentioned

[EER]

I remember it was quite contentious at the time, Sun was bought by Oracle and as a response LibreOffice was forked. Oracle read the room and transferred OO to Apache, where it still resides to this day. Even back then there were plenty of voices calling for not duplicating efforts as it would only be a detriment to Open source office in general. Clearly that was shouting in the void, as is still happening.

[carlod]

That's what happens when you are paid by the number of commits rather than completed tasks.

[neandertalac]

I used all of the mentioned Office apps, including Sophos way back... LibreOffice is progressing really quickly, they've ironed all the little quirks and annoyances. I also use OnlyOffice regularly, but mainly because of almost perfect translate tool, because it doesn't have support for my native language.

[tassaron]

Wow, that commit history is worse than merely being "dead" since it implies some dishonesty. The whole situation is so sad, and I really hope Apache comes to their senses some day and stops this pettiness

[Akab]

OpenOffice was the reason i thought for a long time that i actually needed to pay for MS office to get fairly consistent results 🙃

[TetrisMaster]

For anyone who doesn't know, "trunk" is SVN (Subversion) nomenclature, which seems to indicate that the repository was converted from SVN to git at some point. A sign of a mature (or old) project, at the very least.

[gimcrack]

I remember OpenOffice. Since I switch to Linux back in 2003. Yes, I switch to LibreOffice after I learn about the fork. I'm not sure how people are still using OpenOffice. I don't even know a distro that use OpenOffice as default. All I know they all use LibreOffice as their default Office Suite. At least you're getting the word out.

[raute]

My mother used to work with openoffice for many, many years but a few months ago she got a password protected excel file for work and wasn't able to open it. I uninstalled openoffice and installed libreoffice and every "modern" feature she has needed so far has just worked out of the box.

[kbhasi]

I switched to LibreOffice because Ubuntu switched to including it _(I was using Ubuntu back then)_ and i assumed they did so because it was better. Years later, i realised that both their developers and I made the right choice.

[lamename]

I remember switching sometime in 2012 or 2013 to libreoffice (back when it got taken under the oracle banner). And then a few years (2018 or so) later, for some reason I checked on openoffice, wanting to see if the 2 different projects have diverged enough that some functionality would be better in openoffice than libreoffice. Got really surprised to see that they hadn't changed at all. Nowadays I keep checking every year or 2. Thank you for highlighting this for many more people and making people aware of this.

[idowebwork]

Switched to LibreOffice back when OOO was handed off to Apache. Never looked back.