Then Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, and OpenOffice fell onto .
That, in turn, is what spawned the ; and I think it's fair to say that most users haven't looked back since.
Yes, Oracle ended up to the community via the (ASF); and yes, IBM has behind the effort.
Meanwhile, we've seen LibreOffice with the support of Google and most major distributions even as and have bogged down the OpenOffice side.
This week, the picture got even more complicated when Apache OpenOffice announced a long-awaited update.
"With the donation of OpenOffice.org to the ASF, the foundation, and especially the podling project, was given a daunting task: re-energize a community and transform OpenOffice from a codebase of unknown intellectual property heritage, to a vetted and Apache-licensed software suite," said Jim Jagielski, ASF president and an Apache OpenOffice project mentor, in the official .
"The release of Apache OpenOffice 3.4 shows just how successful the project has been: pulling in developers from over 21 corporate affiliations, while avoiding undue influence which is the death-knell of true open source communities; building a solid and stable codebase, with significant improvement and enhancements over other variants; and, of course, creating a healthy, vibrant and diverse user and developer community," Jagielski added.
Outside reactions haven't been quite so cheerful, however.
“Apache OpenOffice 3.4 Arrives. Does Anyone Care?” was one greeting the new release, and similar sentiments could be heard in comment sections across the board.
To be sure, the new Apache OpenOffice 3.4 brings some key new things to the table, including faster startup, a speedier linear programming solver, an Apache Tomcat update, and .
But does any of it really matter, now that LibreOffice has been adopted so widely?
I'm not so sure. I think OpenOffice may have missed the boat, in fact--LibreOffice has , and the community with it.
What's your take? Does OpenOffice still have a role to play?