OpenOffice

Package Composition

OpenOffice.org is a fully functional suite of office applications developed as part of the international open source project of the same name. The package supports many languages, works under all major operating systems.

It consists of six programme components:

• Writer Text Editor and Web Page Editor
• Calc spreadsheet editor;
• Impress Presentation Creation and Demonstration Tool
• Draw Vector Editor
• Base Database Management System
• editor for creating and editing Math formulas.

History

1999: Sun bought a developer StarOffice

OpenOffice.org originates from the StarOffice office package developed by the German company StarDivision in the mid-90s. In the fall of 1999, Sun Microsystems bought the StarDivision.

2000

Release StarOffice 5.2

In June 2000, already under the Sun brand name, StarOffice 5.2 was released under MS Windows, Linux and Solaris.

Opening code. Start of the OpenOffice.org

On October 13, 2000, the source texts of the StarOffice were opened (with the exception of the code of some modules developed by third companies), and this day is officially considered the birthday OpenOffice.org

2010

Oracle buys Sun

Since the beginning of 2010, the main contractor of the OpenOffice.org has been Oracle Corporation, which bought Sun Microsystems. She is also the owner of the trademark OpenOffice.org.

In October 2010, Oracle announced its intention to continue to support the full range of free office programs OpenOffice. "Oracle developers will continue to develop this project in its current open form," the company's website reports.

Oracle added that they have already demonstrated their commitment to this project, releasing OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 and beta version OpenOffice.org 3.3 with a large number of innovations, testing of which began in August, and the release of the final version is scheduled for the end of this year. Currently, 100 million people worldwide use the package.

The corporation said that in addition to OpenOffice, it supports other open source projects, such as MySQL, GlassFish, Linux, PHP, Apache, Eclipse, Berkeley DB, NetBeans, VirtualBox, Xen and InnoDB, "investing significant funds in their development, testing, optimization and support."

Microsoft struck at OpenOffice

In September 2010, Microsoft posted A Few Perspectives on OpenOffice.org video on its website, which cited feedback from customers who switched to using Microsoft Office after an unsuccessful acquaintance with OpenOffice.org. In order to watch the video on the official website, you need to install the Silverlight plugin .

In the above material, Microsoft using computer animation gives 17 reviews from 15 customers, of which 14 report an unsuccessful experience with OpenOffice.org. As a result, they returned to Microsoft Office, which they originally wanted to save on.

Users complain that in reality OpenOffice.org not only does not allow saving on the budget, but in the long run it turns out to be even more expensive than the package from Microsoft. There are also compatibility problems, lower productivity and reduced efficiency, as a result of which the open product was very disappointed.

"For months, we were forced to spend 30% of our IT resources serving open products. At the same time, it took an additional 25% of the staff to regularly install and maintain these decisions, "said David Sterling, IT manager of the Scottish Central Police Department.

"When working with OpenOffice.org, I had a problem with the lack of sufficient macro support," said an employee of the SARAR Group. "I reached out to the IT department and they recommended that I use Microsoft Excel."

"When working with OpenOffice.org, we had no guarantee that outside our group, the documents would look the same as ours," a Ciar employee said. There is also a quote from a school teacher in the video: "Some of my students use OpenOffice.org to perform homework. There are problems with converting files. As a rule, their scores are lower. "

Each of the statements belongs to one person, and not to any large company, notes Ars Technica. The authors of the publication searched for reviews in the video on the Internet and found that Microsoft used quotes made in articles and reports published over the past 4 years. Moreover, the bulk of these articles and reports are on the website Microsoft.com.

Project OpenOffice.org leaves more than thirty participants

October 2010: More than thirty OpenOffice.org participants announced in an open letter their departure from the project in order to join The Document Foundation consortium. It is expected that in the near future other contractors will leave the OpenOffice.org, writes Digitizor.

After the creation of The Document Foundation, Oracle asked the founders of the project to leave the OpenOffice.org due to a conflict of interest. The open letter was signed by 33 participants of the OpenOffice.org project from Germany among whom the administrator of the OpenOffice.org website Marko Moeller, the participant of Board of OpenOffice.org Jacqueline Rahemipour and a great number of other participants who within the OpenOffice.org project mainly were engaged in documenting, quality assurance, user support and transfers.

Since the right to use the brand OpenOffice belongs to Oracle, the new package received a different name - LibreOffice ("free office"). The first week after the founding of the new community, the beta version of the LibreOffice was downloaded over 80 thousand times, 27 volunteers made a total of about 80 improvements to the project.

Then it was announced - the most popular distribution on the basis Linux - Ubuntu refuses to OpenOffice and goes to LibreOffice.

2011

Oracle discontinues commercial development of Open Office

In April 2011, Oracle released a press release in which it announced the cessation of development of a commercial Open Office product and the transfer of OpenOffice.org development to community control. In many online media, this event was unambiguously interpreted as a victory for the Open Source community in general and The Document Foundation project in particular. However, real facts do not allow such far-reaching conclusions to be drawn.*

First of all, Oracle has remained the most significant participant in the development of OpenOffice.org and acted as an employer for developers who have been developing StarOffice/OpenOffice.org since the foundation of the project. If Oracle really lost commercial interest in Open Office, how will it affect the employment of key developers? The press release does not answer this question.

Recently, The Document Foundation has been actively operating on the PR field and from the outside it may seem that the main development has already 'left' Oracle for a non-profit project. This is a big misconception: a simple comparison of the improvements made in versions OpenOffice.org 3.3 and LibreOffice 3.3 allows us to conclude that most of the real development has so far been carried out precisely under the auspices of Oracle. Most improvements LibreOffice come down to either direct borrowing from the OpenOffice.org, or to those additional functions that have already been available for quite a long time as part of the Go-oo project.

Another question is how the rejection of the development of Open Office as a commercial product will affect Oracle's plans to create a cloud version of office software, announced last year. With a high probability, these plans will also be curtailed - in particular, such suspicions are experienced by the authors of the publication Ars Technica.

Finally, which Oracle community will further develop the OpenOffice.org? Will this community be The Document Foundation or some other? The answer to this question is also still unknown, and in principle the current move of Oracle can only aggravate the situation with the fragmentation of the OpenOffice.org community.

Overall, Oracle's Friday press release is a worrying rather than encouraging development for the Open Source community. It will be very sad if key developers are OpenOffice.org left without work, and the OpenOffice.org community without a single guide. Whether this will be so will show the development of events in the near future.

Oracle transfers OpenOffice.org rights to Apache Foundation

On June 1, 2011, Oracle officially announced the transfer of all rights to the Apache Foundation OpenOffice.org. On June 13, 2011, the fund accepted the offer. After the final transfer of the project to the fund, the license for the OpenOffice.org code will be changed to Apache License 2.0. On this occasion, the Free Software Foundation issued a statement in which it expressed disappointment with the actions of the Apache Foundation, considered the departure from the copyleft license a mistaken step and recommended the use of LibreOffice.

In 2011, LibreOffice, an offshoot of OpenOffice.org that appeared after the "change of power" over the office package, was very successful. LibreOffice exists only a year, but it has about 25 million users worldwide, and this office package is part of most of the leading Linux distributions. In addition, LibreOffice enjoys sponsorship from a number of large companies led by Google.

2012: OpenOffice 3.4

Version OpenOffice 3.4 was released in May 2012.

2013: Sidebar

Developers of Open ­ Office 4.0 decided to simplify users' access to commonly used functions using a side contextual panel specially created for this.

"In recent years, widescreen monitors have become ubiquitous, and we had to think about how to use their capabilities in the user interface," said Rob Weir, a member of the Apache OpenOffice project management committee.

The code for the sidebar OpenOffice taken from the once existing IBM Lotus Symphony office package, which in 2007 became one of the branches of OpenOffice. In 2012, IBM returned its achievements to the OpenOffice project.

Version OpenOffice 4.0 is the first major update that came out after receiving IBM code.

2015: OpenOffice moves to collapse

On April 24, 2015, it became known that the number of developers of a free office package OpenOffice reduced to 16 people, mainly employees of the company. IBM Several mentors remained in the project, able to introduce new developers into the course and not a single release manager remained^[1]

During 2014, 381 changes were made to the OpenOffice. In the alternative project LibreOffice - 22134 changes, which were made by 268 developers from many large companies, including Red Hat, Canonical, Yandex, etc.

In October 2014, questions appeared about the state of affairs in the OpenOffice project. They assumed the possibility of merging OpenOffice with LibreOffice, but representatives of the OpenOffice community declared this information to be the machinations of competitors from LibreOffice. According to lwn.net, the situation is OpenOffice serious, but the likelihood of merging with LibreOffice in the project is considered an unlikely development, although this could benefit everyone, given the fact that Microsoft is gradually transferring all its Office users not a regular subscription.

2016: Closing OpenOffice nearing

September 5, 2016 it became known about the likely termination of the project OpenOffice. The main reason for the likely event is the lack of developers interested in developing and supporting the package.

The vice president of Apache OpenOffice Dennis Hamilton initiated discussion of closing of the project of development of free office package - there are catastrophically not enough developers^[2]

Dennis Hamilton, vice president of Apache OpenOffice'I have long seen limited ability to support Apache OpenOffice in energetic mode. I came to the conclusion that the project is not interesting to new developers who could join our team of about half a dozen volunteers.

There are no decisions on this. According to Hamilton, "closing the project is likely with a high degree of probability."

He believes that the project can be closed in various ways, but suggested leaving the code OpenOffice open and freely available so that anyone can make improvements to the project and continue to develop it if they wish. But in this case, there will be no system for mass collection of comments and proposals existing in the development of open source software.

At the same time, the discussion of the functionality of the OpenOffice will end, the blog and project accounts on social networks will close and the management will leave the project. Only the email address in ASF will be saved, for which the organization will be able to receive applications for the use of the OpenOffice brand.

However, despite the rare update of the OpenOffice, the project product is in demand. According to official statistics, since the beginning of 2015, the number of downloads has reached 29 million.

2022: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.12 with improved sidebar design

After seven months of development and eight years since the last significant release, a corrective release of the Apache OpenOffice 4.1.12 office package has been formed, which offers 10 patches. Ready-made packages are prepared for Linux, Windows and macOS. This became known on May 5, 2022.

Changes to this release include:

• The problem with setting the maximum scale (600%) in the preview mode when a negative value is specified in the "Preview Zoom" field has been solved.
• Resolved problems with file selection dialog size.
• Improved sidebar design.
• Search for rows in the cells of spreadsheets with dates (for example, in the cell with the date'Friday, October 17, 2003 'the search for the string "October" did not work).
• Solved problems with drawing figures with the attribute extrusion-depth^[3].

Notes