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I understand your sentiment and I also cry a bit inside when I see people install OpenOffice because it has the brand identity. However, it has a right to live even as a bit of a zombie.

IT degenerated into a dreadful tribalism virtually from day 1 - ooh my BBC B is so much more beige than your Commodore 64, which is strangely brown. My ZX80 is so worryingly ... rubbish than your errr ... oh well the Z80 runs washing machines really well!

My uncle used punch cards to do programming at university (I'm 53 and he's older). There was a debate about the best clipper thingy tool to use. All they have to do is make a rectangular hole in thin card accurately. It was a precursor to vi vs emacs etc.

OO has a right to live on if there are still users and developers. A monoculture is awful. Do you recall or at least know about IE6? We are also seeing the same thing unfolding yet again with the Cr browsers. Not for me thank you.

Just to bing things back into the real world: In the UK there are several first class spoken languages: English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish. The Brythonic (literally: British) languages suffered dreadfully but have bounced back somewhat. Cornish is starting to show green shoots and Cumbric might be resurrected in some form. There are some others too. These are the languages from before the Romans and the Angles and Saxons made a few changes hereabouts. I think they are incredibly important and without them, the UK would be severely impoverished. That's just the locally grown languages, I should also shout out to the vast number of languages that have rocked up on these shores and enriched the place, from all corners of the world. Its not a one way thing: the welsh word for microwave is often: "popty ping" - see https://welearnwelsh.com/words/welsh-word-for-microwave-popt... for a better discussion

I hope that OO does get get up and have a crack. We could do with some more diversity. I refuse to denigrate someone else's project - I'm not doing anything better.




I don't think it's a fair comparison. OpenOffice sees no meaningful development, and it still has the brand recognition, causing people to mistakenly install it thinking it's basically libreoffice, i.e. actively maintained software. Instead, it's just a snapshot of an ancient version of it, giving people the false impression that the project is dead in its tracks.


Something about the comparison is halting to me.

Rooting for OpenOffice feels like rooting for Linux 2.6 to make a comeback.


Linux 2.4 is where it’s at. I ran that kernel into the ground.


We're still on 2.6 though right? I may have lost track, but I thought 2.4/2.5/2.6 was the last of the stable/long lived dev series.


That’s kind of my point. LibreOffice is OpenOffice, only better and with maintenance.


Meeks wrote up some of the history at The history & pre - LibreOffice https://conference.libreoffice.org/assets/libocon2020/Slides... (PDF). This may help provide context for you to better understand why go-oo and LibreOffice were necessary.

And as you can see, the code is being still (as of 2020) developed outside LibreOffice and OpenOffice. So no concerns about "monoculture."


> OO has a right to live on if there are still users and developers.

There have been almost no developers since IBM left in late 2013.

There are users, but users without developers is an ever-worsening security disaster.

So no - a public hazard does not have a "right to live on".


If only their developer responds to CVEs.




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