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Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

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Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#151

Post by tialaramex »

phkahler wrote: post #118
lbhdc wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> almost a decade of enhancements and improvements to LibreOffice

including, very notably, LibreOffice speaks the current ODF formats and of course the Apache OpenOffice from 2014 (yes, that's the last time they released a new minor version of their software everything since then is just patch fixes) does not.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#152

Post by mixmastamyk »

ptx wrote: post #129
znpy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not just different names but different licenses.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#153

Post by mixmastamyk »

morelisp wrote: post #105
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.

More like the ASF lost any claim to inherently support good governance with OOo.

Can’t good-governance your way out of a stinker project.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#154

Post by stonogo »

bogwog wrote: post #63
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?

Because nobody at the parent organization cares about anything but owning the brand.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#155

Post by lost_tourist »

garganzol wrote: post #36
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.

But still, the site is reasonably usable even by today's standards.

Some would say in spite of today's standards.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#156

Post by eddythompson80 »

sprayk wrote: post #127
jointhehorse wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When Microsoft started getting into the web server business with the gift that keeps on giving that’s IIS, they were using that “patchy server” as a dig on Apache and how more professional IIS is. The Apache project then scrubbed it from all their docs.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#157

Post by alright2565 »

foldr wrote: post #120
alright2565 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sorry, I missed the important context here.

Yeah I don't think anyone is doing anything nefarious here, and I definitely don't want to accuse anyone of acting in that way. I have my own weird hobbies.

I still don't think it's in the project's interest to have these changes merged in, they just confuse the history & make it harder to track down relevant context.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#159

Post by pjmlp »

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…

At least in what concerns Java projects, Apache foundation was always quite relevant.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#160

Post by AlbertCory »

JohnFen wrote: post #50
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…

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.

Hot take: Python 3.

Totally unnecessary.

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