LibreOffice calls on Apache OpenOffice to rally behind LibreOffice

The team behind LibreOffice calls in an open letter addressed to Apache OpenOffice to work together on LibreOffice. According to the team, LibreOffice is the future, while Apache OpenOffice hasn’t had a major release since 2014.

According to the board of The Document Foundation, which is responsible for LibreOffice, the shared goal of both office suites should be to provide as many people as possible with powerful, up-to-date and well-maintained productivity tools. The team reaches out to Apache OpenOffice to collaborate on LibreOffice.

The open letter appears twenty years after the source code of OpenOffice was released. OpenOffice is based on StarOffice, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999 and released under an open source license in 2000. After Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, development slowed down and in 2011 Oracle handed the project over to Apache.

Disgruntled OpenOffice.org developers started The Document Foundation in 2010 and started a fork called LibreOffice, which also used code from the Go-oo office suite. Since then, the project has remained active, unlike that of Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice explains.

According to the project, LibreOffice has a vibrant community with thirteen major releases and 87 minor releases, and there have been over 15,000 code commits where Apache OpenOffice has not had a single major release and 595 code commits. “If Apache OpenOffice still wants to maintain its 2014 4.1 branch, of course, that’s important for existing users. But the responsible thing to do in 2020 is to help new users,” said LibreOffice. In 2016, Apache considered discontinuing support for OpenOffice due to lack of capacity.