We’re thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word, and that’s in large part thanks to the success of the OpenOffice family of word processors. “Family, ” because the OpenOffice name has been attached to several branches of a codebase that’s gone through some serious evolution over the years, starting from its roots in closed-source StarOffice, acquired and open-sourced by Sun to become OpenOffice.org. The same software has led (via some hamfisted moves by Oracle after its acquisition of Sun) to the also-excellent LibreOffice. OpenOffice.org’s direct descendant is Apache OpenOffice, and an anonymous reader writes with this excellent news from that project: “The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache OpenOffice has been downloaded 100 million times. Over 100 million downloads, over 750 extensions, over 2, 800 templates. But what does the community at Apache need to do to get the next 100 million?” If you want to play along, you can get the latest version of OpenOffice from SourceForge (Slashdot’s corporate cousin). I wonder how many government offices — the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft’s biggest customer — couldn’t get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they’re stuck with for now. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What?
