Is the legendary office suite dead or merely moving very slowly?

Cultures · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Once a titan of open-source productivity, Apache OpenOffice has faced years of developer shortages and security crises. While some analysts described the project as dying, others see a resilient, if sluggish, survivor. The truth lies in a complex history of corporate handovers and community fragmentation.

The lineage of Apache OpenOffice is a saga of corporate shifts and community splits. Originally StarOffice, the software was open-sourced by Sun Microsystems in 2000 as OpenOffice.org. However, after Oracle Corporation acquired Sun in 2010, many developers grew concerned about management styles. This led to a massive exodus in September 2010, with the formation of The Document Foundation and the subsequent launch of LibreOffice in January 2011. Apache eventually took over the project, receiving the code from Oracle in June 2011.

Maintaining the software has proven difficult due to a persistent lack of active contributors. For several years, the project struggled to find enough developers to provide timely security fixes. By 2015, industry analysts noted the project was essentially stalled. The impact was visible in security vulnerabilities; for instance, a known remote code execution flaw announced in April 201s5 remained unpatched in the software because developers were simply unavailable. This instability led the Apache Security Team to raise the project's risk status to 'red' as recently as March 2026, citing vulnerabilities older than 365 days.

Despite these struggles, the project remains a significant piece of software history. At its peak in 2013, downloads averaged nearly 148,000 per day. While it has lost much of its initial developer base—with IBM employees providing the majority of development through 2015—the suite continues to function across Windows, macOS, and Linux. It remains a complex ecosystem, incorporating code from IBM's Lotus Symphony and supporting various open formats, even as it navigates a landscape where its primary competitor, LibreOffice, often implements fixes years earlier.

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