Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

rocket9labs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 269 posts

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#141

Post by rbowen »

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…

The ASF does not tell projects what to do. It provides a process and a place, and gives projects autonomy. The project, not the foundation, decides to keep running the project. So to characterize the ASF as "kicking this can down the road" for some kind of inscrutable motivation is just not how things work.

The members of the OO project want to keep running their project. They have a group of people who keep showing up to do user support, documentation, and produce a huge community around their templates. They just haven't pushed any new features for a while. But they still are there, keeping the lights on.

The ASF is not a top-down organization. It's driven entirely by those projects. And if you look at the dev list - https://lists.apache.org/list.html?dev@openoffice.apache.org - you'll note that this issue gets raised on a VERY regular basis, and the project participants always say "no thanks."

As to "making a deal with LibreOffice", I would encourage you to read the mailing list, where that, too, gets raised with great regularity. There, too, the community sentiment is "no thanks." On both sides.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#143

Post by yifanl »

laurent123456 wrote: post #20
shaftoe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears to be true. https://github.com/apache/openoffice/activity

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.

Mostly to me, it shows the importance of a sane lint/format step in the pre-commit hook, it prevents engineers spending an near-infinite amount of time on this type of cleanup.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#144

Post by ghusto »

Or the committer is making very small changes that are hard too see amongst the massive whitespace changes his auto-formatter makes every time she saves a

Latest commit:

https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/ce48dd1f26396c7a...

Can you spot the change?

Just because the software doesn't have massive changes (that nobody asked for anyway), doesn't mean it's unmaintained.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#145

Post by rbowen »

samus wrote: post #136
PeterZaitsev wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. What I mean is what is the process of moving projects there ?

Either the Project Management Commitee kicks it off, or the ASF's board does it. The fake activity in the repo is probably supposed to prevent attracting attention from the board: > When should a project move to the Attic? > Projects whose PMC are unable to muster 3 votes for a release, who have no active committers or are unable to fulfill their reporting duties to the board are all good candidates for the Attic. So…

No, the commit activity is not to prevent attracting the attention of the board, since the board does not monitor commit activity as a metric of project health.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#146

Post by broeng »

systems_glitch wrote: post #90
JohnFen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with software, sometimes there comes a time when it really should stop growing. When any further "enhancements" make the software worse. It's something I've seen countless times in my life. A piece of software achieves something pretty close to perfection for its task, but the self-imposed "need" to continue development on it ruins it.

Absolutely. Some things go into bugfix-only mode because their code has reached perfection for the 99% use case.

And then we fear it's a dead project, and move on in search for something else with active contributors.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#147

Post by PetahNZ »

smrtinsert wrote: post #139
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.

Man that is a beautiful web page. Clear linkage, no infinite scroll, shape and indentation based visual flow, 100%!

Unless you view it on mobile...

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#148

Post by JohnFen »

broeng wrote: post #146
systems_glitch wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Some things go into bugfix-only mode because their code has reached perfection for the 99% use case.

And then we fear it's a dead project, and move on in search for something else with active contributors.

Certainly not everyone. Personally, I pay little attention to that sort of thing at all. I don't care if it's a "dead" project or not -- as long as the software is meeting my needs, that's the only thing that matters. If/when it stops doing that, then I'll look for alternatives.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#149

Post by mardifoufs »

mnau wrote: post #132
monocasa wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Meh, cyber resilience act will kill it. Two or three years and it's gone. Shipping a product with known security vulnerability is not only forbidden, it's also explicitly something manufacturer will be liable for.

Isn't that just in Europe? They can forbid whatever they want, good luck stopping an open source project from getting installed because of security reasons lol

I guess it won't be prepacked in distros but I'm not sure any distro still ships with OO.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#150

Post by indymike »

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…

> If a project ends up in Apache it feels to me like it has gone out to pasture.

There are many Apache Foundation projects that are active and important or complete and important.

Unfortunately OpenOffice is not any of the above, and it was that way almost from the beginning. The original OO community largely went with LibreOffice. They did not like the interference of Oracle and later IBM in their project's governance. So, Apache got the trademarks from Oracle and a community of people who were largely not maintainers. This put Apache, almost from day one, in position to be competing with the community of one of their own projects.

Post reply on HN