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Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

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Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#31

Post by toyg »

ploum wrote: post #18
i80and wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this happened a long long time ago. LibreOffice inherited approximately 100% of developer effort. The problem is that Apache is effectively lying about OpenOffice still being a thing, and trapping less-savvy users who aren't aware of this context into an office suite frozen in time in 2014.

Another part of the problem is that the "OpenOffice" brand is still strong. Lot of people continue to talk about OpenOffice and look for it on Google. Oracle just managed to kill a strong FLOSS brand. But, in some way, the LibreOffice fork energized the community.

For the record, Oracle didn't kill OO on purpose, they just fumbled with it. Despite what they might have pretended in sales demo at the time, they've never been in the business of building office suites, let alone opensource ones, so they didn't really know how to deal with it. In the end they even did the right thing, by passing it on to Apache, when they could have just quietly strangled it in a basement.

Ironically, one of the most anti-Microsoft companies ever unwittingly managed to do Microsoft a massive favour.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#32

Post by ndiddy »

Twirrim wrote: post #9

Why on earth are we advocating for spamming the software foundation with emails about deprecating OpenOffice?

When there's so little developer interest that remote code execution vulnerabilities are unfixed over a year after being disclosed (https://lwn.net/Articles/699047/) and most of the developer activity is one person changing whitespace around so the project's GitHub page has a green activity graph, I think it's irresponsible of Apache to act like OpenOffice is still an active project instead of redirecting users to LibreOffice (or giving them the trademark).

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#33

Post by red_trumpet »

giamma wrote: post #16

I think the history recap is somewhat incomplete. I believe that the death blow which lead to the fork LibreOffice was the lack of trust in Oracle commitment to Open Office and open source in general, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. Sun indeed had largely reduced its involvement in the project in the last years, and there was the "Symphony incident" [1]. The death blow was when Oracle arrived, started the tri…

Both your links go to the same article.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#34

Post by saurik »

dale_glass wrote: post #24

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 o…

I believe a key issue is that the license of LibreOffice is copyleft (I believe some mixture of LGPL and MPL) and so the Apache Foundation--which specifically focuses on code that is not copyleft (a focus I personally disagree with, but is at least consistent)--feels something is lost to the world if they truly give up on the one permissively-licensed open source office suite.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#36

Post by garganzol »

jroseattle wrote: post #15

Entirely unrelated, but it's just so retro. The trunk branch, the Bugzilla list, the OS/2 support, the user forums, the multi-hour build process, the XHTML 1.0 compliant badge on the https://www.openoffice.org/ homepage ..... Reminds me of the good old days.

But still, the site is reasonably usable even by today's standards.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#38

Post by aeinbu »

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.

Could it be someone is hiding information in there? Could this be steganography? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#39

Post by zoogeny »

brand wrote: post #21
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.

There is a quote: "When you stop growing you start dying" (William S. Burroughs). I am not sure I believe that the kind of governance that Apache is providing is helping to grow the projects under its supervision.

Your comparison to Terraform is also interesting. Apache Kafka, for example, has been absorbed by Amazon (MSK). Apache Spark is Amazon EMR. Just looking through Amazon's paid service offering I find several Apache projects rebranded and for sale. A cynical take could be that Apache is an org that helps companies like Amazon profit off of the work of open source developers.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#40

Post by ianburrell »

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…

Apache has lots of active projects. But they are mostly data analysis. At work, we use Airflow to run Spark jobs which uses Hadoop and Hive.

Apache also has a lot of dead projects that never got picked up by users. Apache should have a marker for zombie projects so people don't start using them.

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