Bad news for Open Source fans as OpenOffice is probably reaching the end of its life. The OpenOffice project apparently lacks the developers it needs to be secure, up-to-date, and functional.
This is because the best of the team of developers it employed moved to the OpenOffice fork, namely LibreOffice, years ago.
A recent email from Apache OpenOffice Vice President Dennis Hamilton titled “What Would OpenOffice Retirement Involve?” states:
“My opinion is that there are no developers who have the ability” to close security gaps that exist in the project.
Anyone who has followed the history of OpenOffice – LibreOffice, the above news was probably expected. For example, LibreOffice has had 14 updates since 2015, compared to one update that OpenOffice released in October 2015.
While, officially, OpenOffice is not dead yet, for practical reasons it is already an application of the past.
It all started when Oracle, then a sponsor of OpenOffice, stopped working with LibreOffice developers in 2010. With this move, Oracle not only got rid of top OpenOffice developers, but also helped create a wall between the OpenOffice code and LibreOffice.
Then Oracle stopped investing in OpenOffice. So within a year, companies like Canonical replaced OpenOffice with LibreOffice.
LibreOffice, which runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, is one of the largest office suites. In addition to open source enthusiasts, government agencies in the UK, France, and Italy have also started using the application.
