OpenOffice may soon be retired
I've got some bad news for those who prefer free alternatives instead of using Microsoft's Office suite: there's a strong chance that Apache's OpenOffice will soon be discontinued. It seems that there are too few developers left working, and only being able to keep up with the security issues in the code is a big challenge, so the Apache foundation is thinking about completely retiring the suite. A discussion on the fate of OpenOffice will take place next month.
The fact that OpenOffice is seriously struggling shouldn't be that much of surprise to those who are familiar with the project. As some of you know, the suite was initially maintained by Sun Mycrosystems, but when the company got acquired by Oracle, most of the developers got involved in creating the LibreOffice suite while others went on to work on personal project. As I previously stated, the current situation seems to be pretty dire, with the existing team struggling to simply keep the product secure enough to be usable, so new features and improvements are pretty much out of this question. Taking all this into account, many people believe that the best solution would be to turn the suite over to The Document Foundation and either supercharge LibreOffice, or create a powerful hybrid of the two.
In the meantime, if you prefer using free office suites, you might want to read some of our other stories like: "Best Free Alternatives of MS Office for Mac" or "Useful tips for Google Docs users".
