Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

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The LibreOffice project was announced with great fanfare in September 2010. Nearly one year later, the OpenOffice.org project (from which LibreOffice was forked) was cut loose from Oracle and found a new home as an Apache project. It is fair to say that the rivalry between the two projects in the time since then has been strong. Predictions that one project or the other would fail have not been borne out, but that does not mean that the two projects are equally successful. A look at the two projects' development communities reveals some interesting differences.

Release histories

Apache OpenOffice has made two releases in the past year: 4.1 in April 2014 and 4.1.1 (described as "a micro update" in the release announcement) in August. The main feature added during that time would appear to be significantly improved accessibility support.

The release history for LibreOffice tells a slightly different story:

Release Date 4.2.3 April 2014 4.1.6 April 2014 4.2.4 May 2014 4.2.5 June 2014 4.3 July 2014 4.2.6 August 2014 4.3.1 August 2014 4.3.2 September 2014 4.2.7/4.3.3 October 2014 4.3.4 November 2014 4.2.8 December 2014 4.3.5 December 2014 4.4 January 2015 4.3.6 February 2015 4.4.1 February 2015

It seems clear that LibreOffice has maintained a rather more frenetic release cadence, generally putting out at least one release per month. The project typically keeps at least two major versions alive at any one time. Most of the releases are of the minor, bug-fix variety, but there have been two major releases in the last year as well.

Development statistics

In the one-year period since late March 2014, there have been 381 changesets committed to the OpenOffice Subversion repository. The most active committers are:

Most active OpenOffice developers By changesets Herbert Dürr 63 16.6% Jürgen Schmidt 56 14.7% Armin Le Grand 56 14.7% Oliver-Rainer Wittmann 46 12.1% Tsutomu Uchino 33 8.7% Kay Schenk 27 7.1% Pedro Giffuni 23 6.1% Ariel Constenla-Haile 22 5.8% Andrea Pescetti 14 3.7% Steve Yin 11 2.9% Andre Fischer 10 2.6% Yuri Dario 7 1.8% Regina Henschel 6 1.6% Juan C. Sanz 2 0.5% Clarence Guo 2 0.5% Tal Daniel 2 0.5% By changed lines Jürgen Schmidt 455499 88.1% Andre Fischer 26148 3.8% Pedro Giffuni 23183 3.4% Armin Le Grand 11018 1.6% Juan C. Sanz 4582 0.7% Oliver-Rainer Wittmann 4309 0.6% Andrea Pescetti 3908 0.6% Herbert Dürr 2811 0.4% Tsutomu Uchino 1991 0.3% Ariel Constenla-Haile 1258 0.2% Steve Yin 1010 0.1% Kay Schenk 616 0.1% Regina Henschel 417 0.1% Yuri Dario 268 0.0% tal 16 0.0% Clarence Guo 11 0.0%

In truth, the above list is not just the most active OpenOffice developers — it is all of them; a total of 16 developers have committed changes to OpenOffice in the last year. Those developers changed 528,000 lines of code, but, as can be seen above, Jürgen Schmidt accounted for the bulk of those changes, which were mostly updates to translation files.

The top four developers in the "by changesets" column all work for IBM, so IBM is responsible for a minimum of about 60% of the changes to OpenOffice in the last year.

The picture for LibreOffice is just a little bit different; in the same one-year period, the project has committed 22,134 changesets from 268 developers. The most active of these developers were:

Most active LibreOffice developers By changesets Caolán McNamara 4307 19.5% Stephan Bergmann 2351 10.6% Miklos Vajna 1449 6.5% Tor Lillqvist 1159 5.2% Noel Grandin 1064 4.8% Markus Mohrhard 935 4.2% Michael Stahl 915 4.1% Kohei Yoshida 755 3.4% Tomaž Vajngerl 658 3.0% Thomas Arnhold 619 2.8% Jan Holesovsky 466 2.1% Eike Rathke 457 2.1% Matteo Casalin 442 2.0% Bjoern Michaelsen 421 1.9% Chris Sherlock 396 1.8% David Tardon 386 1.7% Julien Nabet 362 1.6% Zolnai Tamás 338 1.5% Matúš Kukan 256 1.2% Robert Antoni Buj Gelonch 231 1.0% By changed lines Lionel Elie Mamane 244062 12.5% Noel Grandin 238711 12.2% Stephan Bergmann 161220 8.3% Miklos Vajna 129325 6.6% Caolán McNamara 97544 5.0% Tomaž Vajngerl 69404 3.6% Tor Lillqvist 59498 3.1% Laurent Balland-Poirier 52802 2.7% Markus Mohrhard 50509 2.6% Kohei Yoshida 45514 2.3% Chris Sherlock 36788 1.9% Peter Foley 34305 1.8% Christian Lohmaier 33787 1.7% Thomas Arnhold 32722 1.7% David Tardon 21681 1.1% David Ostrovsky 21620 1.1% Jan Holesovsky 20792 1.1% Valentin Kettner 20526 1.1% Robert Antoni Buj Gelonch 20447 1.0% Michael Stahl 18216 0.9%

To a first approximation, the top ten companies supporting LibreOffice in the last year are:

Companies supporting LibreOffice development (by changesets) Red Hat 8417 38.0% Collabora Multimedia 6531 29.5% (Unknown) 5126 23.2% (None) 1490 6.7% Canonical 422 1.9% Igalia S.L. 80 0.4% Ericsson 21 0.1% Yandex 18 0.1% FastMail.FM 17 0.1% SUSE 7 0.0%

Development work on LibreOffice is thus concentrated in a small number of companies, though it is rather more spread out than OpenOffice development. It is worth noting that the LibreOffice developers with unknown affiliation, who contributed 23% of the changes, make up 82% of the developer base, so there would appear to be a substantial community of developers contributing from outside the above-listed companies.

Some conclusions

Last October, some concerns were raised on the OpenOffice list about the health of that project's community. At the time, Rob Weir shrugged them off as the result of a marketing effort by the LibreOffice crowd. There can be no doubt that the war of words between these two projects has gotten tiresome at times, but, looking at the above numbers, it is hard not to conclude that there is an issue that goes beyond marketing hype here.

In the 4½ years since its founding, the LibreOffice project has put together a community with over 250 active developers. There is support from multiple companies and an impressive rate of patches going into the project's repository. The project's ability to sustain nearly monthly releases on two branches is a direct result of that community's work. Swearing at LibreOffice is one of your editor's favorite pastimes, but it seems clear that the project is on a solid footing with a healthy community.

OpenOffice, instead, is driven by four developers from a single company — a company that appears to have been deemphasizing OpenOffice work for some time. As a result, the project's commit rate is a fraction of what LibreOffice is able to sustain and releases are relatively rare. As of this writing, the OpenOffice blog shows no posts in 2015. In the October discussion, Rob said that "the dogs may bark but the caravan moves on." That may be true, but, in this case, the caravan does not appear to be moving with any great speed.

Anything can happen in the free-software development world; it is entirely possible that a reinvigorated OpenOffice.org may yet give LibreOffice a run for its money. But something will clearly have to change to bring that future around. As things stand now, it is hard not to conclude that LibreOffice has won the battle for developer participation.

