We received the following mail from Mr. Ziegler on the developer mailing list [1] and we want to share it with all of you:
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I was encouraged to leave my aoo forum post directly in the dev mailing
list so that you all can read what I wanted to express. I am not a
software developper in any sense--only a user.
Dear developers,
there may be little positive feedback for your work, I guess. So I
created an account for the forum (and now subscribed temporarily to
dev@aoo) to leave a big THANK YOU!
The first version I used must have been something like StarOffice
4.3, the first I owned was SO 5.2, and then I shifted to
OpenOffice(.org) when it introduced the XML file formats. So I am a
convinced and longterm user since then and hardly ever regretted my
decision.
OpenOffice gave me the possibility to mostly do what I wanted to
(with writer, base, calc, impress and draw - in that historic order) in
an efficient way, and the only thing I don't like is, that it always
tends towards following MS Office although it already was better in
many ways. I understand that it is crucial to get as many users as
possible, so I acknowledge the decisions towards MS Office.
What I like most is the long term usability and stability, and I do
not only keep my office files from more than 10 years ago, I also use
and re-use them. And if one crashed in the past, I nearly always could
recover them by opening the zip bundle with an (hex) editor.
By that, I enjoyed the progress in LibreOffice, but didn't really
need it. Although I switched to LibreOffice on some machines, I am
always glad that there is OpenOffice, too. In my eyes, it is the more
stable and efficient branch of the project. This year it was my
fallback tool and salvation in a book project that I started with LO
Writer; I first invested hours to get my pictures back to the place
they belonged to when they got more and more (as others did decades
before with MS Word) and then had to give up as it didn't open the file
anymore without crashing. Apache OpenOffice (standard and portable)
solved the problem. It got a nice book, by the way, for our church
jubilee.
So if you get the software maintained, I will probably continue to
use OpenOffice for another 20 years. And I won't switch to DTP software
(Scribus) for the next book project neither like I regularly do for
magazines, brochures etc.
OpenOffice is a great, great software, even if it didn't evolve much
in the last years! (maybe even: because..) Powerful enough for both
private and standard business use.
Keep patience and persistance!
A very satisfied and content user
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[1] Archived message in the developer mailing list