51–60 of 269 posts
I wonder if there is some process in Apache Foundations for projects to be depreciated/wind down With lack of activity in OpenOffice frankly it might be best for community if those projects join forces
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.
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…
If the OpenOffice kerfuffles weren't sapping enough energy out of the ecosystem, that users could suddenly use free, no-install-ever, not-equivalent-but-still-fine online tools did the rest.
Used to be an enthusiastic OpenOffice and LibreOffice user and developer—not of the core tools, but as part of bigger document processing and publishing workflows. Even presented at the OpenOffice Conference in 2007 (Moit de gust, Barcelona!) But after Google Docs, Sheets, etc. ... have not needed OpenOffice or LibreOffice nor used them in anger for over a decade.
Surely if you don't like a project rather than writing open letters and whatnot, you fork it? That's the whole point of open source. That's how gcc project governance got fixed - egcs forked and made the improvements they wanted, won the argument and basically became the main branch. Some of the history is here https://softpanorama.org/People/Stallman/history_of_gcc_deve...
>> He stared writing the compiler being almost thirty years old. That means at the time when his programming abilities started to decline. What is that supposed to mean?!
The more general interpretation is that the author of that page is egregiously ageist.
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.
When I find something interesting on github, before deciding to use it, I check the number of committers and the commit history/frequency.
Anyone can do the same for Apache projects.
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.
2. What has the author done to engage so far? Has Apache responded to their emails? Have they opened any threads in chat forums?
3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just being minimally kept alive?
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.
The pointless commits combined with the lack of transparency feel a bit nefarious. I wonder if it's more about personal drama between the projects than anything else?
Surely if you don't like a project rather than writing open letters and whatnot, you fork it? That's the whole point of open source. That's how gcc project governance got fixed - egcs forked and made the improvements they wanted, won the argument and basically became the main branch. Some of the history is here https://softpanorama.org/People/Stallman/history_of_gcc_deve...
>> He stared writing the compiler being almost thirty years old. That means at the time when his programming abilities started to decline. What is that supposed to mean?!