[ Thanks to James
Maguire for this link. ]
“There’s been little question, for a long time now,
that the free-and-open-source office suite OpenOffice.org (or OO.o)
has been stagnating. It’s a grand and daring project that’s been
choking on its own inertia for too long.“The good news is that some fresh blood may finally be entering
its veins, in the form of the Document Foundation creating their
own branch of OO.o: LibreOffice. What’s less clear is whether or
not they will simply repeat the mistakes of the past.“I myself in these pages penned a farewell letter to OO.o in
favor of Microsoft Office 2010, mostly out of practicality. I
haven’t summarily decided that I’ll never use OO.o again—I’m
always willing to give future iterations of the program a
chance—but I see now that a great deal of work needs to be
done with it, both as a program and as a project.“I say these things not out of contempt for OO.o, but because I
want to see it improved—and real improvement is often painful
and difficult.”