Friday, May 11, 2012

Apache OpenOffice 3.4, New Name, New Version

Apache OpenOffice 3.4, New Name, New Version:
Changing the name of an established product is something that companies do not do very often. There are a number of reasons for that, from losing part of the products visibility and brand, to causing customer and user confusion.
When it comes to Open Office, we have seen quite the confusion in recent time. Back in 2010 when Oracle acquired Sun, the rights to OpenOffice went to Oracle as well. Many developers of the community did not like the move, and Oracle’s plan to create a commercial version of OpenOffice, and decided to create LibreOffice, a fork based on the original OpenOffice code.
Oracle back in June 2011 decided to hand over the OpenOffice project to the Apache Foundation. This move made it clear that Oracle was not longer interested in distributing a commercial version of the Office suite, and that the company more or less had no interest in the project.
apache openoffice
Today, a new version of OpenOffice was released, and with it came a name change to Apache OpenOffice. The change log lists a lot of changes, including faster startup times, improved CSV export, file size reductions for pdfs containing monochrome bitmaps, improved printing on Unix, enhanced chart visualizations, and a license change to Apache License 2.
The License has changed to our simpler, non-restrictive, Apache License 2. The Apache License will make adoption, distribution and modification of the software easier for all users and developers. Of course the software remains free, and the source code with its updates will continue to be available through the Apache Software Foundation servers.
Interested users can download the latest version of Apache OpenOffice 3.4 at the official website, where it is available for all supported operating systems and languages. The Windows installer has a size of about 145 Megabytes.
What’s your take on the new name change? Confusing? Or just an inevitable step that does not really hurt the Office suite further? And while we are it it: which Office suite are you currently using primarily? (via Caschy)

ICT4PE&D

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank's!