Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project? • Hacker News Board

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#41

Post by debacle » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

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.

Terraform wouldn't be in the ASF unless it was dead, is the point.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#42

Post by tombert » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 4:32 PM UTC

yrro wrote: post #27

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.

Honestly I didn't even know that OpenOffice was even ostensibly maintained anymore. I've not heard of anyone using it in about a decade.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#43

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 4:34 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#44

Post by Allamande » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 4:34 PM UTC

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.

As an programmer with OCD, I understand this maintainer. A lot of times I tidy up old code while trying to remember how something was done.

Also, I read a lot of the diffs and even a bit of the dev mailing list, development is as slow as it gets but there is new code being commited.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#45

Post by discussDev » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

I think office 365 killed it. Microsoft added enough value to be "why not?".

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#46

Post by jszymborski » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 4:36 PM UTC

yrro wrote: post #27

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.

I think the continued co-opting of the name of a first nation as their "brand" despite repeated calls from stake holders to do otherwise has caused plenty of harm to the ASF brand.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#47

Post by KptMarchewa » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #41

brand wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Terraform wouldn't be in the ASF unless it was dead, is the point.

There is giant amount of actively worked upon, very heavily used software projects in Apache: Airflow, Spark, Flink, Kafka, Lucene and a lot of foundations on which those are written or use: Parquet, Arrow, Iceberg.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#48

Post by cratermoon » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

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.

> the multi-hour build process

Many years ago I became proficient with the Linux kernel build process, and later regularly built Mozilla with my preferred configuration and so forth. Both processes take some doing. I thought building OpenOffice couldn't be much of a challenge, it wasn't an operating system after all. I can't recall if I ever got it done. If I did, it was certainly the most vanilla possible build, taking all the defaults for a bog-standard build.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#49

Post by monocasa » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

yankput wrote: post #30

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 libr…

One issue is that OpenOffice has had unfixed remote code execution vulnerabilities for years, but won't shepherd it's users to the actually maintained version, while still pretending to be under active maintenance itself in what's a hop, skip, and a jump away from fraud IMO.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#50

Post by JohnFen » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 4:38 PM UTC

zoogeny wrote: post #39

brand wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But with software, sometimes there comes a time when it really should stop growing. When any further "enhancements" make the software worse.

It's something I've seen countless times in my life. A piece of software achieves something pretty close to perfection for its task, but the self-imposed "need" to continue development on it ruins it.