What's next for Apache OpenOffice

I sincerely whish the AOO project to get back on its tracks, even if I find it unlikely to happen. They still haven't managed to do that securityfix release, but they have a feature release in the works, and are tenacious. They're not the greatest Free office suite out there, but that isn't a good reason to kill the project.

But until they do (and it'll take them years to get back on track even in the most optimist projections), having average users directed to AOO is really irresponsible. The users who are not savvy enough to switch projects are also the ones most vulnerable to security issues in their software. And if those users get bitten by an AOO bug hard enough that they look for alternatives, chances are that they'll switch to MS Office rather than LO. It's currently one of the greatest thorn in FOSS's side.

For 5 years people have been waiting for AOO to either suceed (and make the trademark proud) or die off (and return the trademark to LO). Neither has happened or look likely to happen soon, and many people's patience is exhausted. It's really sad when the third option (give/share the trademark to/with LO, and compete on merit without Oracle's spitefull choice of successor mess up the popularity numbers) is technically easy.