Apache OpenOffice 4.0 Released With Major New Features 238
An anonymous reader writes "Still the most popular open source office suite, Apache OpenOffice 4 has been released, with many new enhancements and a new sidebar, based on IBM Symphony's implementation but with many improvements. The code still has comments in German but as long as real new features keep coming and can be shared with other office suites no one is complaining." The sidebar mentioned brings frequently used controls down and beside the actual area of a word-processing doc, say, which makes some sense given how wide many displays have become. This release comes with some major improvements to graphics handling, too; anti-aliasing makes for smoother bitmaps. In conjunction with this release, SourceForge (also under the Slashdot Media umbrella) has announced the launch of an extensions collection for OO. Extensions mean that Open Office can gain capabilities from outside contributors, rather than being wrapped up in large, all-or-nothing updates. You can download the latest version of Apache OpenOffice here.
Re:Merge Already! Libre/Open (Score:5, Informative)
Because they use different licenses. OpenOffice uses the Apache license, LibreOffice mostly GPL. Merging them is not feasible since either of them would have to give up something they don't want to in return.
And LibreOffice is already merging improvements (Score:5, Informative)
LibreOffice 4.1 is out later this week and they already imported all the bug fixes from Apache Office. According to https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-1-new-features-and-fixes/ they picked up at least these improvements:
"A very large number of bugs have been fixed at an estimate of around 3000 bugs, of which 400 came from authors with apache.org mail addresses."
and
"Sidebar (Apache OpenOffice/IBM Symphony) with resizeable layout (LibreOffice team)"
I wonder when apache office will merge fully with LibreOffice.
Re:Play Nice (Score:5, Informative)
No Worries, LibreOffice got you covered (Score:3, Informative)
Don't worry, LibreOffice already has all the improvements imported from Apache, see https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-1-new-features-and-fixes/
Re:Sidebar the differentiator - really? (Score:3, Informative)
Too bad users use the product and don't gain direct productivity merely from looking at Ohloh stats.
But if they did, the numbers you point at show an interesting story. It shows that the average AOO contributor makes twice the number of commits as the average LO contributor. And the average AOO commit is far more significant, touching twice the number of files as the average LO commit. Net it out and the average AOO contributor is 4x as productive compared to the average LO contributor!
Re:German code comments (Score:5, Informative)
Because the original codebase comes from StarOffice, which was developed by a German company (StarDivision).
Re:Sidebar the differentiator - really? (Score:4, Informative)
This is nonsense... The sidebar stuff wasn't written by anyone in Apache - it was IBM code from the symphony project/fork donated to Apache that was then merged into AOO and merged (with small improvements like resizing) into LO as well...
As for the not visible bit have a look through the new features and fixes in 4.0 [libreoffice.org] and 4.1 [libreoffice.org].
There's a lot of nice new content with visible useful features such as chart import and export as both ODC and images in calc, presentation mode in Impress, visio import in Draw (that was LO 3.5), huge reduction of java dependencies, refactor how calc views cells internally for much faster performance on large spreadsheets, MS Publisher import, and the list goes on ....
As for letting the code speak for itself ... yes please do and it's obvious which project is currently healthier and better overall.
Re:Sidebar the differentiator - really? (Score:2, Informative)
> In a way what you say is absolutely true but then that misses the mark but quite an impressive amount. It's almost to the point I feel a need to call you out on this as being literally true so no one can call you a liar but that truth being represented in such a way as to mask the real situation.
Yeah, that was some "interesting" statistics. But it is really easy to refute. In the last 12 months there were 52 developers on the Apache side (note they include people "hacking on the website" and 351 developers on the TDF/Libreoffice side (who are "pure" code hackers, website, etc is done by other people). Now lets just pretend those 300 "extra" LibreOffice hackers aren't there. Just look at the top 50 hackers on both sides. Also on Ohloh you can find that the 50th most active Apache hacker did 2 commits in the last 12 months, the 50th most active LibreOffice hacker did 53 commits the last 12 months. To get to the contributor in LibreOffice that only did 2 commits in the last 12 months you need to go down all the way to contributor number 150 (!).
Or the other way around, the top contributor to Apache (rcwier an IBM manager who mainly does HTML edits) contributes 755 commits in the last 12 months. The top 8 LibreOffice hackers contribute more than that number of commits (and all of them actual code, not just website promotion edits).
Re:IBM Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
I can't let bullshit like that stand.
IBM specifically dedicates a group of developers to every project they open source, as far as I can tell.
For OpenOffice, this is even mentioned in the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
And yes, I checked the references. The statement is correct.
You are an asshole, for lying like that. BOOO!