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Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

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Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#61

Post by yankput »

monocasa wrote: post #49
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.

yeah that’s a good point

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#63

Post by bogwog »

IseardMi wrote: post #37

It looks like most of the recent commits are done by someone as mostly a way of learning and not for the sake of the project itself. https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/d2a7b3cc90e95392...

Why does someone like that have full commit access to the repo?

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#64

Post by softwaredoug »

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.

Agreed... We are seeing dozens of database companies turn their OSS into basically proprietary shared code licenses. And we seem to still pretend its "open source"

Collaboration, across companies, not ownership by one company is the root of open source. To do that you need some kind of governance model. Essentially "ownership" by one company is conducive to quick progress on specific problems, but not collaboration.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#65

Post by purpleidea »

Of course everyone agrees with OP's post. It's been dead for a while. We've been trying to convince Apache leadership to kill it forever. The problem is that the ASF is fundamentally broken. It's just a fake 501(c)(3) which actually runs like a 501(c)(6) -- which serves corporate interests, and it should be shutdown. All their projects are just about serving corporations instead of the public good, as legally required under the tax code for this organization.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#66

Post by jointhehorse »

jszymborski wrote: post #46
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.

It's no worse than Amazon being named after the rainforest and river despite not originating there, or Apple being named after the fruit despite not being a greengrocer. Names get reused, it's not a big deal.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#67

Post by phendrenad2 »

It seems to me that Apache started out as a general software conservancy, but they have become hyperfocused on -vaguely - big data infrastructure. They have collected many useful projects (OpenOffice, Subversion, NetBeans, Maven, Groovy), but those projects are now being left to rot. Meanwhile, Apache has also collected a huge percentage of the big data infrastructure world (Kafka, Avro, Druid, Flume, Flink, Hive, Hadoop, HBase, Mesos, Spark, Solr, Pig, you get the idea) and those are watered and made to flourish. Not sure why they hold onto OpenOffice and Subversion with a dying grasp, but I assume it's a lack of leadership.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#68

Post by The_Colonel »

cratermoon wrote: post #48
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, tak…

Well, Linux is just kernel, and as such doesn't take so much time to build. A whole operating system (depending on what's in scope) would take hours or even days

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#69

Post by yrro »

lbhdc wrote: post #57
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.

Has it? I have used both libreoffice and openoffice, I had no idea openoffice was related to asf until I read your post. I have heard other talk about how people should use libreoffice, but it isn't apparent why.

Back in the day there was real interest in "OpenOffice" among non-geeks. Governments were mandating that documents be published in OpenDocument format. Microsoft sought to muddy the waters by publishing the confusing "Office Open XML" format (which they then never implemented).

And then OpenOffice the project just... stopped. No new features, and eventually no new releases. And by squatting on the brand, they prevented that momentum from transferring to LibreOffice.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#70

Post by wiremine »

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…

Go to die, or go to provide incremental improvements? Maybe a bit of both? Either said, it's a good question.

Some projects are going to die, and I don't think that's the fault of the organization behind it. I'd love to see a more detailed analysis of all the current projects at Apache, and their growth/decline, and a breakdown of _why_ they're growing or declining. Maybe Apache is the problem, maybe it isn't.

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