Apache OpenOffice Releases Version 3.4

An anonymous reader sends word that Apache OpenOffice 3.4 has been released (download). This is the first release since OpenOffice became a project at the Apache Software Foundation. The release notes list all of the improvements, the highlights of which The H has summarized: "According to its developers, Apache OpenOffice (AOO) 3.4.0, the first update since OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 from January 2011, now starts up faster than its predecessor and introduces a number of new features such as support for documents secured using AES256 encryption. The Linear Programming solver in the Calc spreadsheet program has been replaced with the CoinMP C-API library from the Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR) project. As in LibreOffice 3.4.0, the DataPilot functionality has been renamed to Pivot Table, and now supports an unlimited number of fields. A new 'Quote all text cells' CSV (Comma Separated Values) export option has been also added to Calc. Other changes include improved ODF 1.2 encryption and Unix Printing support and various enhancements to the Impress presentation and Draw sketching programs."

Re:The Real Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I still use OpenOffice at home because based on the LibreOffice install at work what's changed is mostly bugs, crashes, and perverse behaviour.

For example: it seems to be impossible to open a tab-separated file in Calc. Try it from within Calc, and it'll dump the file into Writer instead.

Re:Apache ftw!

[Hatta]

Are you planning to modify your office suite and distribute those modifications as closed source? If not, the differences between GPL and BSD are irrelevant to you. If so, why?

Re:Heap of junk vs. LibreOffice...

[shutdown -p now]

You can't merge GPL code into Apache license code, it's not compatible that way.

Instead, Apache should just give the rights to OpenOffice brand to LibreOffice, and merge their changes into LO codebase (which is possible).

Re:Apache ftw!

[serviscope_minor]

LGPL is more friendly because you can link to code and apis without the license applying to their own code.

That must be an entirely insignificant proportion of the users of something like LO/OO.

Many corporations have anti gnu policies for that reason.

Silly corporations. If they want to have silly policies, that's their problem. Many many many many corporations have accepted Linux and/or gcc, which means accepting the GPL. Even Microsoft had to bow to the inevitible and make Linux work well under Hyper-V. If some corporations reckon they know better than Apple, Google, Intel, AMD, ARM, Samsung, HTC, NVidia, Nokia (well, who doesn't know better than them these days), Cray, SGI, Amazon, Facebook, huge numbers of banks, every smartphone manufacturer, every supercomputer vendor, every vendor which makes SoCs large enough to run a proper OS, and untold numbers of other companies, then I guess that's their choice.

Re:Heap of junk vs. LibreOffice...

[DragonWriter]

Yeah an few users by comparison. People don't know what LibreOffice is. Sorry but the Libre folk should merge back with the product which has some market share.

Marketshare (as opposed to usage share or other shares) is usually defined as "$ sales for product/$ sales for all products in the market". As such, both LO and AOO have either 0% marketshare or undefined marketshare, depending on how you draw the boundary of the market.

Usage share, I suspect that LibreOffice has at least as much as AOO (which, after all, just had its first stable release), though they both probably have less than their common ancestor, OOo.

LibreOffice is also more feature rich and under more active development, so from all indications AOO is likely to get further and further behind over time, which is going to make it very hard for it to maintain, much less gain, usage share against LO.

I've got one possibility

[je ne sais quoi]

I've got a great reason that I'm downloading openoffice right now for. It's this [freedesktop.org] issue. In a nutshell, many moons ago Excel changed their selection rules behavior for no explicable reason and every other spreadsheet on the planet has been copying their behavior. When you call the developers on this, like the guy who submitted this bug report, the developer response is "everyone else does it this way so I won't change it". If Libreoffice is going to strive to be the best clone of Excel that it can, why would I use it? Given the choice, I'll just use Excel. Maybe the Apache version of OO.org still has some distinct behavior instead of just being a clone of something else.

Re:I've got one possibility

[je ne sais quoi]

I can confirm that the Apache OO still follows the sane way to select multiple cells unlike Libreoffice. For me, this is a "killer" feature -- I can't live without this so libreoffice has been uninstalled and OO has come back onto my desktop.

As an aside, why is it nowadays that I spend more time trying to get software to behave the way it used to behave before it was updated? I've had problems with "upgrades" of MS Office, OS X, Windows, Openoffice, gnome, kde, and even just getting e17 to work any more on my home machine is an issue. Either I'm just getting old or the productivity of software on the desktop has peaked and in the continual drive for improving things, we're just making worse software. I still upgrade, because there are often some new features that I like in the new software, but it often feels like one step forward, one step back.