The Apache Software Foundation offers a suite of office productivity software named Apache Open Office. Based on the download page, you would never guess the last major release of the software was made available in 2014.
With that bit of release history in mind, would it be fair to consider Apache Open Office as an un-maintained project? In this blog post, I share a quick recap of the history behind Apache Open Office, and my opinion on why The Apache Software Foundation’s actions may be masking the answer to this question.
My parents got new phones and have endless hassles with photos being HEIC instead of JPEG.
Document formats are much more fucked up than image formats, at the best of times, and Microsoft almost certainly changes shit just to keep Open Office a little bit broken. This version is ten years out of date. Unless you stick to editing documents you wrote yourself - there is not a chance in hell it works the way people expect.
I really do believe most people editing documents are going to be using the same tool as everyone else. Even using stuff like Google Docs to edit docx doesn’t work super well. It’s definitely a nice to have feature but I really don’t consider it the most important thing.
I’m also not trying to say anyone should use or even like open office. I’m mostly saying the idea of delisting it because it hasn’t seen a “major” update since 2014 seems wrong.