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Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

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Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#111

Post by sprayk »

eulers_secret wrote: post #81
The_Colonel wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Getting flashbacks to Gentoo building when I only had a single core. Good learning experience…

I unfortunately stopped daily driving gentoo right as core counts in consumer machines started to go above 1. I have played around w/ it a few times since, and was blown away by how much faster emerges go when you add ever increasing numbers to -j in your make opts.

Building large software is consistently the only useful thing I can do that will fully utilize all CPU resources. Seeing all the bars in the red in htop on a box with a lot of threads doesn't get old.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#112

Post by phkahler »

talent_deprived wrote: post #92
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.

>> > Apache is the place OSS goes to retire/die >> Fortunately many of us in the world disagree with the dystopian warped view.

They would still be doing everyone a favor if they shut down OpenOffice completely and hand the trademark over to The Document Foundation. The name is better than LibreOffice, and the fact that a grossly outdated version of OpenOffice is what people will be finding is detrimental to the project. Most the developers and the code have moved on, but the name and a bunch of old code lives on with ASF for no good reason. Seriously there is NO reason for it except the completely selfish (and harmful to others) excuse that ASF can claim to be the stewards of OpenOffice. In my dystopian imaginary world they are even paid to maintain this situation to prevent more widespread adoption of LibreOffice.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#113

Post by geertj »

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've felt for a long time (maybe even a decade) that Apache is the place OSS goes to retire/die.

It's a bit too strong as others have pointed out that there are very active projects under the Apache umbrella. But I do feel that there's a core of truth in this. Specifically, Apache does appear to provide a "way out" for large enterprise customers that want to dump non-strategic (to them) code somewhere and not necessarily invest in it. Seems something that could be solvable on the ASF side by having additional criteria before accepting projects, and maybe require a certain level of activity for continued membership.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#114

Post by AceJohnny2 »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #110
softwaredoug wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To put it another way: many startups today have adopted the "Open Core" business model, and it's really more about marketing than actual open-source. "Open Core" means they open-source the core of their product portfolio, core which some enterprising people may use to develop applications on, but for others will really need the buy into the rest of the portfolio to get the best use out of.

I can't really fault companies for using this model. Development is expensive, and business models around open-source are hard. I mean, just look at what Red Hat ends up doing to fend off copycats. Getting people to try your product and also rely on it is a tricky proposition.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#115

Post by znpy »

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…

> "When you stop growing you start dying"

death is part of life though, and the only thing that grows without and end is cancer (quite literally).

I don't see why project can't just be considered "done": yeah you update dependencies and make it work with new/current formats, but essentially it's done. The use case is now clearly defined, implemented and tested.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#117

Post by znpy »

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…

> 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.

I mean... can you blame them? I would have forked too, if anything out of caution. The lawnmower has no feeling.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#118

Post by phkahler »

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.

>> I have heard other talk about how people should use libreoffice, but it isn't apparent why.

Because there is almost a decade of enhancements and improvements to LibreOffice that are not present in OpenOffice. It's simply a better tool suite and there is no disputing that. If you try you'd be trolling.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#119

Post by phkahler »

sparrc wrote: post #82
purpleidea wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of the most significant OSS orgs in the world They haven't been relevant for years.

They definitely are relevant despite what the armchair experts say on HN. Do you use AWS or GCP or Fastly? These companies don't provide huge sponsorship dollars to Apache out of the goodness of their hearts. Many of the cloud services you use are backed by one or more Apache projects.

>> Many of the cloud services you use are backed by one or more Apache projects.

So name the projects being used and not the dollars flowing to ASF. Also this is completely orthogonal to the fact that they keep OpenOffice "alive" strictly selfishly for their own benefit and to the detriment of LibreOffice.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#120

Post by foldr »

alright2565 wrote: post #93
foldr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everyone knows that Apache's OpenOffice is barely maintained. That's not a reason to attribute nefarious motives to the person making these commits. This whole thread is going a bit bonkers making unfounded accusations about this particular individual.
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