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Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

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Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#91

Post by kuchenbecker »

augustk wrote: post #72
zoogeny wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do you think software needs to grow?

It needs at least a stable set of users, but maintaining a set of users is essentially managing the set of people onboarding and the set of people migrating off.

If you're shrinking then a competitor is providing better options, or your problem space has shifted.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#92

Post by talent_deprived »

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 is the place OSS goes to retire/die

Fortunately many of us in the world disagree with the dystopian warped view.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#93

Post by alright2565 »

foldr wrote: post #29
laurent123456 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Are there so few bugs and issues in OpenOffice that, for months, the most pressing matter is to fix the incorrect use of "its" in comments?

I mean this person is German (their Github bio). Even if they're not a programmer, why don't they instead take the time to translate some of the many german source files to english, like Libreoffice did back in 2013[1]?

[1]: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2013/02/07/the-docu...

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#94

Post by sprayk »

travisjungroth wrote: post #74
jointhehorse wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amazon is a place. Apple is a fruit. Apache is a people. Specifically, a people that had genocide committed against them. It’s at least a little worse.

> Co-founder Brian Behlendorf states how the name 'Apache' was chosen: "I suggested the name Apache partly because the web technologies at the time that were launching were being called cyber this or spider that or something on those themes and I was like we need something a little more interesting, a little more romantic, not to be a cultural appropriator or anything like that, I had just seen a documentary about Geronimo and the last days of a Native American tribe called the Apaches, right, who succumbed to the invasion from the West, from the United States, and they were the last tribe to give up their territory and for me that almost romantically represented what I felt we were doing with this web-server project..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apache_Software_Foundation...

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#95

Post by bee_rider »

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.

OpenOffice is a great name, LibreOffice is a pretty bad one. I think Office is just too bound to the OpenOffice brand at this point.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#96

Post by the-smug-one »

discussDev wrote: post #45

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

It didn't, OpenOffice hasn't been active for many years. Office365 (and its bundling with Teams) is however a challenge for LibreOffice, the actually active development branch.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#98

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

The_Colonel wrote: post #68
cratermoon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> A whole operating system (depending on what's in scope) would take hours or even days

I'm sure a full OS can take that long (ex. Windows, probably), but at least NetBSD can build a whole OS from source quite quickly. (Of course, NetBSD makes an effort to optimize that process; their build.sh is really a thing of beauty)

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#99

Post by fragmede »

TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #78
purpleidea wrote: post #65

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 require…

> It's just a fake 501(c)(3) which actually runs like a 501(c)(6). Not everyone is familiar with the nuances of your country's tax codes. Would you care to interpret that?

501c3's get tax breaks, 501c6' don't. C3's are supposed to be for charitable, religious, and educational organizations, C6's are for chambers of commerce or business leagues, like the ABA which is all the lawyers.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#100

Post by AndyMcConachie »

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 was recently searching around for a good enterprise search engine and wanted something OSS. I found Apache Lucene and so far I really like it. It's got documentation, a clear release schedule, and I know lots of other people use it. I was happy to hear that it's Apache because it probably means it won't die because one maintainer goes away. Maybe it's silly, but if I find a project is Apache it gives me a good feeling.

Of course some of their projects die. That's OSS. But that's not something you can solve for. Even paid software goes away after awhile.

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