Should Apache Concede OpenOffice Is Done With & Point Users To LibreOffice?

Prominent GNOME and Fedora developer Christian Schaller has published an open letter to the Apache Software Foundation and Apache OpenOffice teams asking them to redirect OpenOffice.org to the LibreOffice web-site.

After his recent first hand experience of having a family member running the outdated OpenOffice.org rather than LibreOffice, and OpenOffice.org really not being in active development, Christian is hoping to get the Apache folks to redirect OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice -- or at least prominently advertise LibreOffice. That way users looking for a free office suite will not by default run this outdated free software.

Christian commented, "Letting users believe that OpenOffice is still alive and evolving is only damaging the general reputation of open source Office software among non-technical users and thus I truly believe that it would be in everyones interest to help the remaining OpenOffice users over to LibreOffice...So dear Apache developers, for the sake of open source and free software, please recommend people to go and download LibreOffice, the free office suite that is being actively maintained and developed and which has the best chance of giving them a great experience using free software. OpenOffice is an important part of open source history, but that is also what it is at this point in time. "

You can read Christian's open letter in full via his blog.