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Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

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Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#21

Post by brand »

zoogeny wrote: post #8

I've felt for a long time (maybe even a decade) that Apache is the place OSS goes to retire/die. It is heartbreaking in some ways, they became the stewards for a lot of interesting projects [1]. And the venerable web server was so important to the early web. I am still running Apache vhosts on a few personal websites. It is also a totally unfair characterization. I mean, they still house relevant projects including K…

It seems that “younger generation” programmers underestimate the value of governance in OSS. The recent Terraform kerluffle couldn’t have happened if Terraform was in the ASF, etc.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#22

Post by giamma »

zoogeny wrote: post #8

I've felt for a long time (maybe even a decade) that Apache is the place OSS goes to retire/die. It is heartbreaking in some ways, they became the stewards for a lot of interesting projects [1]. And the venerable web server was so important to the early web. I am still running Apache vhosts on a few personal websites. It is also a totally unfair characterization. I mean, they still house relevant projects including K…

I think this is a wrong perceptions. Projects come and go, based on adoption, community interest, technology evolution, trends...

There are still a lot of projects at Apache.

Check their last annual report [1], especially the sponsors and the statistics sections.

[1] https://apache.org/foundation/docs/FY2023AnnualReport.pdf

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#24

Post by dale_glass »

Okay, so we've known this is happening for a while. But why though?

First, I don't understand what's the ASF's position here. Do they have some political reason to keep kicking this can down the road? Is there money on the line? Is it just somebody refusing to give up?

And given the licensing allows, why don't they rebrand LibreOffice, rather than keeping a zombie of a project?

Or why don't they just make some sort of deal with LibreOffice?

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#25

Post by zellyn »

KirillPanov wrote: post #2

> we find that whitespace changes are not just part of the commits that Apache Open Office has been receiving, whitespace changes make up a substantial amount of the commits added to the repository. wat.

My guess is possibly one of those "make a commit to an open source repo" to enter things?

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#26

Post by mistrial9 »

giamma wrote: post #22
zoogeny wrote: post #8

I've felt for a long time (maybe even a decade) that Apache is the place OSS goes to retire/die. It is heartbreaking in some ways, they became the stewards for a lot of interesting projects [1]. And the venerable web server was so important to the early web. I am still running Apache vhosts on a few personal websites. It is also a totally unfair characterization. I mean, they still house relevant projects including K…

I think this is a wrong perceptions. Projects come and go, based on adoption, community interest, technology evolution, trends... There are still a lot of projects at Apache. Check their last annual report [1], especially the sponsors and the statistics sections. [1] https://apache.org/foundation/docs/FY2023AnnualReport.pdf

those Fortune 500 funders are slightly balanced by "pineapple fund" !

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#27

Post by yrro »

Apache's stubborn refusal to direct OpenOffice users towards LibreOffice has done immeasurable harm to the Apache brand and it's basically ruined the OpenOffice brand. A great example of the damage that can be done by poor stewardship.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#28

Post by yankput »

laurent123456 wrote: post #20
shaftoe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears to be true. https://github.com/apache/openoffice/activity

All these commits are so strange. They are all useless "clean up" commits yet they are not done by a bot, there's someone manually making these changes every few days, almost every day actually. Don't know if he's really trying to make the project seem active, or trying to score a certain number of commits, or if he's just really passionate about cleaning up that codebase all by himself.

It doesn’t look malicious, it seems he is randomly looking and fixing the codebase and the ASF lets him because who cares.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#29

Post by foldr »

laurent123456 wrote: post #20
shaftoe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears to be true. https://github.com/apache/openoffice/activity

All these commits are so strange. They are all useless "clean up" commits yet they are not done by a bot, there's someone manually making these changes every few days, almost every day actually. Don't know if he's really trying to make the project seem active, or trying to score a certain number of commits, or if he's just really passionate about cleaning up that codebase all by himself.

I don't see anything particularly strange about them. This recent commit, for example, fixes some typos and changes some formatting a bit. HN seems to be taking a very conspiratorial turn in its thinking recently.

https://github.com/apache/openoffice/compare/d98be9a24613ebe...

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#30

Post by yankput »

OpenOffice is dead but who cares? ASF doesn’t really spend any funds on it, it doesn’t eat away any attention, doesn’t really fork the community because nobody really cares about ooo, at least there is something stable there. I don’t know, there are things that gets me from my chair more.

Like the weirdness with “libreoffice versions” forced by collabora. (I understand, collabora spends a lot of money developing libreoffice so they want some money back on support, but it is so hard to understand those versions…)

edit: ugh fixed the company name. sorry

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