OpenOffice available?

[Bill Cole]

On 11 May 2018, at 10:10, Chris Jones wrote:

> LibreOffice is now the defacto standard free office application, I 
> would say. It forked from OpenOffice a while back, and whilst 
> OpenOffice is largely in decline, LibreOffice is far from it. For the 
> reasons why, ask your favourite search engine.

The many pronouncements of OpenOffice's death from the disastrous period 
of Oracle hegemony through ~2016 have not turned out to be true. It's 
actually getting worked on again at Apache and is less diverged from the 
old Sun version than is LibreOffice so if one was satisfied with 
OpenOffice in 2007 it might be just fine today. I've used both (as well 
as the Mac-only NeoOffice derivative) and am hard pressed to say one is 
substantially better or worse. LO has more development velocity, which 
is a mixed blessing. I feel like every time I launch LO there's an 
update available and "The automatic download of the update is currently 
not available" because it never has been and probably never will be 
because automatic updates don't provide a chance to ask for a donation. 
As always, more new code always brings more new bugs, so if your 
priority is stability over new features, OpenOffice is still maybe a 
better choice.

(and no, I'm not an Apache shill. I have an apache.org address because 
I'm a contributor & PMC member on the SpamAssassin project. I wouldn't 
touch the AOO code with someone else's 10-foot pole.)

-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Currently Seeking Steady Work: https://linkedin.com/in/billcole