This article is about an Office suite under continuing development. For its discontinued ancestor, see OpenOffice.org.
Apache OpenOffice (AOO) is an open-source office productivity software suite. It is one of the successor projects of OpenOffice.org and the designated successor of IBM Lotus Symphony.[5] It is a close cousin of LibreOffice and NeoOffice. It contains a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation application (Impress), a drawing application (Draw), a formula editor (Math), and a database management application (Base).[6]
Apache OpenOffice's default file format is the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an ISO/IEC standard. It can also read and write a wide variety of other file formats, with particular attention to those from Microsoft Office – although, unlike LibreOffice, it cannot save documents in Microsoft's post-2007 Office Open XML formats, but only import them.[7]
Apache OpenOffice is developed for Linux, macOS and Windows, with ports to other operating systems. It is distributed under the Apache License.[4] The first release was version 3.4.0, on 8 May 2012.[1] The most recent significant feature release was version 4.1, which was made available in 2014. The project has continued to release minor updates that fix bugs, update dictionaries and sometimes include feature enhancements. The most recent minor release was version 4.1.7 in September 2019.
Difficulties maintaining a sufficient number of contributors to keep the project viable have persisted for several years. In January 2015 the project reported a lack of active developers and code contributions.[8] There have been continual problems providing timely fixes to security vulnerabilities since 2015.[9][10][11][12] Downloads of the software peaked in 2013 with an average of just under 148,000 per day compared to about 50,000 in 2019 and 2020.[13]
See also: OpenOffice.org § History
After acquiring Sun Microsystems in January 2010, Oracle Corporation continued developing OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, which it renamed Oracle Open Office. In September 2010, the majority[14][15] of outside OpenOffice.org developers left the project[16][17] due to concerns over Sun's, and then Oracle's, management of the project,[18][19] to form The Document Foundation (TDF). TDF released the fork LibreOffice in January 2011,[20] which most Linux distributions soon moved to,[21][22][23][24] including Oracle Linux in 2012.[25][26][27]
In April 2011, Oracle stopped development of OpenOffice.org[28] and laid off the remaining development team.[29] Its reasons for doing so were not disclosed; some speculate that it was due to the loss of mindshare with much of the community moving to LibreOffice[30] while others suggest it was a commercial decision.[31] In June 2011 Oracle contributed the OpenOffice.org trademarks[32] and source code to the Apache Software Foundation, which Apache re-licensed under the Apache License.[33] IBM, to whom Oracle had contractual obligations concerning the code, appears to have preferred that OpenOffice.org be spun out to the Apache Software Foundation above other options or being abandoned by Oracle.[34][35] Additionally, in March 2012, in the context of donating IBM Lotus Symphony to the Apache OpenOffice project, IBM expressed a preference for permissive licenses, such as the Apache license, over copyleft license.[36] The developer pool for the Apache project was seeded by IBM employees,[37] who, from project inception through to 2015, did the majority of the development.[38][39][40][41][42][43]
The project was accepted to the Apache Incubator on 13 June 2011,[44] the Oracle code drop was imported on 29 August 2011,[45] Apache OpenOffice 3.4 was released 8 May 2012[1] and Apache OpenOffice graduated as a top-level Apache project on 18 October 2012.[46][47][48]
IBM donated the Lotus Symphony codebase to the Apache Software Foundation in 2012, and Symphony was deprecated in favour of Apache OpenOffice.[42] Many features and bug fixes, including a reworked sidebar, were merged.[49] The IAccessible2 screen reader support from Symphony was ported and included in the AOO 4.1 release[5] (April 2014), although its first appearance in an open source software release was as part of LibreOffice 4.2 in January 2014.[50] IBM ceased official participation by the release of AOO 4.1.1.[51]
In September 2016, OpenOffice's project management committee chair Dennis Hamilton began a discussion of possibly discontinuing the project, after the Apache board had put them on monthly reporting due to the project's ongoing problems handling security issues.[52][53][54]
A timeline of major derivatives of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org with Apache OpenOffice in blue
By December 2011, the project was being called Apache OpenOffice.org (Incubating);[55] in 2012, the project chose the name Apache OpenOffice,[56] a name used in the 3.4 press release.[1]