The State of Apache OpenOffice As Of Early 2021

It's rare to hear of OpenOffice usage these days compared to LibreOffice, but the open-source office suite is still going ahead under its volunteer work at the Apache Software Foundation. This past weekend at FOSDEM 2021 was a status update on Apache OpenOffice.

Peter Kovacs provided a status update on Apache OpenOffice on the work and milestones over the past year. Compared to LibreOffice 7.0 in 2020 with Vulkan rendering support and many other new features, Apache OpenOffice just had a maintenance release. But even with OpenOffice not being in the limelight like it once was, it's still seeing over one million downloads per month.

Among the few items to note from the current state of Apache OpenOffice include:

- The biggest issue has been getting new volunteers onboard.

- Contributors to OpenOffice Core for Q1'2020 were 7, which was a 50% reduction. In Q2 they were at eight contributors.

- OpenOffice 4.1.8 released in Q3 and was the first release where the Windows and Mac installers were signed by Microsoft and Apple, respectively. This release brought various bug fixes while work is still underway towards OpenOffice 4.2.

- The 300 million download milestone crossed in Q3, with the project still seeing 1.4~1.7 million downloads per month.

Learn more about the current state of Apache OpenOffice via the FOSDEM presentation.