Dear Apache OpenOffice® Users,

Thank you for your interest in Apache OpenOffice and your on-going support over the years. You may have heard (e.g., through our support forums) that OpenOffice has problems with Apple's new macOS 11 (Big Sur).

When opening modern Microsoft Office Documents (files that end with .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, for example), OpenOffice crashes. There is no workaround at this point, but we are going to fix the issue soon.

We would be happy to give you more details if you want to help us with testing. Just write a mail to the developers mailing list dev@openoffice.apache.org.

The main reason is to fix the bug on Big Sur. We will also include some other minor fixes in the release, so all platforms can benefit from the new release. We know that this is a pressing issue to our Mac users, so you can expect the release soon on our download web page.

In order to identify the issue we took a closer look at our build to exclude any issues with an error in prior releases. Next, we updated the build to a newer SDK issue to exclude any issue in our support structures. We believe that our upcoming version 4.2.0 (which is not yet production-ready) is not affected by this issue. In an effort over Christmas a comparison took place between the 4.2.0 and 4.1.8 versions to locate the issue. We have found the code change that solves the crash on Big Sur.

We are testing the solution at this point. If you want to join the test of the new version of this fix, drop an e-mail in English to the developers mailing list dev@openoffice.apache.org. The more environments we test the sooner we can release.

The OpenOffice project thanks Jim Jagielski for his endless effort during Christmas time, and the French forum users who supported the development effort with dedicated testing.

We wish you a good and healthy start into the new year.

All the best and stay tuned.