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Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

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Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#121

Post by rbowen »

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…

I'm fascinated at your characterization of both Kafka and Spark as being absorbed by Amazon.

AWS offers hosted versions of each. They are not, as you say "rebranded and for sale", but rather are hosted services, running whatever upstream releases.

But to say that the project as been absorbed by AWS (in either case) is simply false. Spark is developed by a community of numerous companies, of which Databricks is usually most prominent. Kafka is likewise a community of several organizations, of which Confluent tends to be the most influential.

Yes, Apache is (and always has been) business-friendly. The license enables companies to profit on those projects. But, for the most part, companies that benefit from those project also contribute back to them, as a way to ensure sustainability. That's how it is supposed to work.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#122

Post by rbowen »

addicted wrote: post #89
KptMarchewa wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe the real problem is that the ASF has been adopting too many abandoned projects that have been “donated” by much bigger entities (e.g. Google donating Wave). This is the right thing to do from a helping the world perspective, but it’s clearly hurt ASF’s reputation. They should simply start saying no to some of these dead/dying projects. Or at the very least brand them differently.

It's important to note that the ASF did say no to Wave. It never made it out of the Incubator, because it was unable to build an active user community.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#123

Post by [deleted] »

kuchenbecker wrote: post #91
augustk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#124

Post by samus »

sparrc wrote: post #58

1. Please don't email-spam one of the most significant OSS orgs in the world. 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?

It damages both the Apache and OpenOffice brands. People who have heard of MS Office alternatives have probably OpenOffice in their mind and will attempt to use it. They will probably be dissatisfied and have a bad impression of OpenOffice, Apache, and OpenSource in general.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#125

Post by phkahler »

saurik wrote: post #34
dale_glass wrote: post #24

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.

>> 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.

And here I thought they were just against OpenOffice, this interpretation pits them against Free Software more generally. I'm gonna run with that for a while and see how it fits.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#126

Post by rbowen »

ianburrell wrote: post #40
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 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.

The ASF does have a marker for retired projects. See https://attic.apache.org/

Software projects have a natural lifecycle, and since we've been around for almost 30 years, there's going to be a number of projects in that state.

However, the ASF doesn't force projects into the attic while they still have a community around them. OpenOffice is an edge case - there's still a project community, primarily around templates and other end-user-centric activities. They're just not doing much with the actual software any more.

Granted, there's room to disagree as to whether 1) the ASF should force projects into the attic and 2) whether OO actually has an active community. But the Foundation's position is that this is the decision of the project, not one to be forced top-down by the Board.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#127

Post by sprayk »

jointhehorse wrote: post #101
sprayk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Ge…

That is almost certainly a retcon - their FAQ used to say otherwise, back in the late 1990s: > Why the name "Apache"? > A cute name which stuck. Apache is "A PAtCHy server". It was based on some existing code and a series of "patch files". https://web.archive.org/web/19970106233141/http://www.apache...

Hm, interesting. I guess they both could be true, like I could totally see myself sitting around trying to come up with a fun name for my software project and being influenced by a film I saw the previous weekend. But given that the documentary where the quote originated smells more like marketing than anything else, I would not be surprised at all if this were indeed a retcon. I wish the docu was still up.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#128

Post by toast0 »

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…

> A cynical take could be that Apache is an org that helps companies like Amazon profit off of the work of open source developers.

Apache httpd certainly helped tons of companies profit, so helping companies profit doesn't seem off-brand.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#129

Post by ptx »

znpy wrote: post #107
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.

> 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" "open source" here is working as intended. the thing is, "open source" is misunderstood by many (most?) individuals. "open source" was explicitly created by Eric Raymond and others in the late 90ies because the Free Software movement was seen as too extremistic by…

Well, sort of. Open source was just a different name to describe free software, with the purpose of emphasizing the collaboration benefits this gives the business rather than the freedom it gives users. But this "business source" stuff is a different thing which is not open source at all.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#130

Post by cratermoon »

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

True, but it's not the total time, it's the complexity involved in build process, as in https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Kernel/Configuration

As a first approximation, one would not expect building a suite of office tools to be more complex than building an operating system kernel.

Also, for the people saying "it's only the kernel, not the whole O/S", consider that building the kernel requires having a running system with all the dependencies.

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