OpenOffice didn’t receive any major update since 2014, so this should give you a picture on how slow and discontinued the development is on the project.Īlthough of all of that, the Apache Foundation is acting dead, as if nothing happened, and are bragging about their 300M downloads that they got since they received the ownership of the project in 2011. Versions 4.1.7 and 4.1.6 were released in 20 respectively, and they also contained nothing more than few fixes (5-10) for some bugs. The latest available version of OpenOffice right now is 4.1.8, which was released this month, but is nothing more than a bug-fixing release with no new features. The Apache Foundation from its side continued the development a little bit for a while (Until 2016-2017) but then, OpenOffice stopped reciving any major updates. Oracle found itself in a tough spot since most of the community migrated to the new fork, and hence decided to contribute the ownership of OpenOffice in the same year to the Apache Foundation. Hence, LibreOffice was born in 2011 and most community members started working on LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. The community feared that Oracle would shut down the project due to its past dark history against open source software and didn’t want to participate in a project under its control.

It continued to be a the mainstream Microsoft Office alternative through the 2000s and kept improving over time, until a community fork happened in 2011 after Oracle acquired Sun.

OpenOffice started as the open source version of “StarOffice” by Sun Microsystems in 1999.

Apache openoffice vs libreoffice 2016