Apache Talks Up More Than 333 Million OpenOffice Downloads

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apache Talks Up More Than 333 Million OpenOffice Downloads

While Apache OpenOffice development is rather stagnate, many of the original OpenOffice.org developers left for LibreOffice long ago, and LibreOffice has been delivering far more modern features and functionality, people continue to download OpenOffice. This week the Apache Software Foundation is celebrating more than 333 million downloads of their open-source office suite...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Apache-OpenOffice-333-Million

[mirmirmir]

Ok boys, you know the drill.

By the way, do we have stats for libreoffice download?

[andre30correia]

this software should redirect to libreoffice, this is a nonsense

[tildearrow]

Of which 320 million are from bots

[kpedersen]

and LibreOffice has been delivering far more modern features and functionality

I am increasingly disappointed by the performance of LibreOffice. So perhaps that could be the niche of OpenOffice one day. To be faster and less "modern".

[Mani]

This is definitely nothing to celebrate.

The brand OpenOffice is still very strong in the Windows community, I know a great deal of people who have never heard of LibreOffice but who have tried OpenOffice (most of the time many years ago, but since the project is pretty much stalled that should not make much of a difference) and were very disappointed by its appearance, speed and functionality.

OpenOffice was one of my first experiences with open source software and I loved it (note this was back in 2004). For me it was truly amazing how such a marble could be created and offered freely to the world, not only making it available to poor families but also enabling the compilation to a much broader set of operating systems. Today, after more than a decade of bitrot, the project does not look or feel modern anymore, to the contrary it discourages the use of privacy friendly open source software since it has fallen so far behind the competing proprietary offerings.

While I still see a lot to be desired in LibreOffice in direct comparison to OpenOffice, you see the giant leaps they have accomplished over the years. Improvements unseen by the great majority of office users because they are on windows and have never even heard of the project.

Not transferring the name rights of OpenOffice to The Document Foundation may be one of the most accidentally harmful things that happened to the broad adoption of open source software in recent years.

[tomtomme]

far more interesting:

74064546-fd8f-458a-b3da-9cddc61dd3a6.png
300 million was celebratet in 2020. So roughly only 16 mio a year now and decreasing.

source https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/
Thursday October 29, 2020

[all3f0r1]

297 million downloads by Windows users, 31 million downloads by macOS users, and just 4.7 million downloads by Linux users... Well, presumably the Linux users are better educated and going straight for the modern and more maintained LibreOffice.

Michael, I've been a regular reader for 10+ years now, but this ending sentence wasn't necessary. You're most likely (at least partly) right, but there may be other reasons.

Starting with the obvious, how come is LibreOffice so poorly advertised that after a decade, it still isn't considered the go-to office suite?

More anecdotal, but my father (almost retired cobol dev) hates LibreOffice and stays with OpenOffice, which, according to him "keeps my documents working, unlike LO which is messing everything". There may have been regression that I'm not aware of, I don't know, but given a sufficient amount of such discrepancies in your daily work flow, I can understand why LO would be considered "not production ready". (I'm a LO user BTW, and have not experienced major issues with it, but my documents are pretty basic usually).

[kylew77]

I prefer Open Office because it looks more like Office XP, but the compelling grammer check and spell check in Google docs has me using that more and more these days. I actually have a legal copy of office 2003 that I can run in Wine on FreeBSD or crossover on Linux, but again see myself using it less and less. A web based approach is simply "good enough" most of the times nowadays and I don't have to worry about forgetting to save a document with the g suit my work uses. Thankfully we use the google docs set in place of MS modern office with the stinking ribbon.

[Old Grouch]

"development is rather stagnate" should read "development is rather stagnant"