אָפּענאָפפיסע איז טויט

די גייז בייַ אָראַקלע שטעלן אויס אַ סטאַטעמענט אַמאָל לעצטע וואָך וועגן זייער פֿרייַ און עפענען-מקור אָפיס סוויט, אָפּענאָפפיסע. טרעפן וואָס? זיי ניטאָ מאכן עס אַ “קהל פּרויעקט”; י.ע. זיי ניטאָ געלאזן עס צו שטאַרבן.

דער טרויעריק טייל איז וואָס אָפּענאָפפיסע איז געווען זייער פאָלקס: פילע מעק ניצערס געניצט עס (זינט אָפיס פֿאַר מעק קאָס אַ טאָן) און שעפע פון ​​ווינדאָוז ניצערס געניצט עס ווי געזונט (רובֿ מענטשן זענען נישט געגאנגען צו נוצן אַלע די פֿעיִקייטן פון מייקראָסאָפֿט אָפיס, וואָס קאָס, וואָס, $100?) אבער טאָן ניט זייַן דיסקערידזשד, it’s not as bad as you might think. Read on to see.

נעבעכדיק, I’ve been a bit abrupt. Here’s the backstory.

Back in 1999, Sun Microsystems bought an office suite called StarOffice. Being the swell guys they were (no sarcasm there, they were pretty decent), they open-sourced StarOffice and made it OpenOffice, released in 2002.

All went well till January 2010, when Oracle bought out Sun. Oracle aren’t as swell as Sun: they hate open-source stuff, so naturally OpenOffice’s days were numbered.

The OpenOffice users always complained to the developers since, געזונט, OpenOffice sucked and no new features/bugfixes that people wanted were added (mostly due to Oracle hating open-source stuff.) Some users modified OpenOffice and called it Go-oo, which was very similar to OpenOffice except it had a bunch of modifications everyone wanted.

Eventually, the developers got tired of Oracle and the complaints. In September 2010, they officially split with OpenOffice (computer geeks call it forking the project) and made ליברעאָפפיסע. At the time, it was the same thing, but under a different name.

Those developers quit Oracle and formed the Document Foundation, which was the community group in charge of developing LibreOffice. They started writing their own code (and the guys at OpenOffice wrote their own code), so the projects started slowly moving away from each other.

LibreOffice was an instant success; it’s basically a good version of OpenOffice (if you’re wondering, the patches in Go-oo were added to OpenOffice) that actually listens to users. Most people made the switch to LibreOffice from OpenOffice, since they weren’t losing anything. Some major Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora, decided to replace OpenOffice with LibreOffice as their default office suite. That’s big (imagine Microsoft deciding to package Firefox or Chrome as the default browser in Windows. It’s that big.)

So where was I? Since all the momentum (and good developers) was with LibreOffice, OpenOffice started dying (not that it wasn’t dying already.) And now Oracle’s performed the coup de grace (sort of) and basically killed OpenOffice.

איך וויסן, איך וויסן, they made it a “community project.” Problem is, there’s no community for OpenOffice. It’s like taking your car to the local Jiffy Lube for a tuneup, except all the mechanics are on lunch break. Nothing’s going to happen.

טל;דר – The developers from OpenOffice split from it and made their own office suite, ליברעאָפפיסע. OpenOffice lost its community and developers, so it’s been killed.

So what does this mean to normal people? Not much, פאקטיש, it’s just an interesting read on a Sunday afternoon. Although it makes the decision easier for people who want a free office suite.

אַגעוו, you can download LibreOffice (now the only major free office suite) here.