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Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

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Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#161

Post by ptx »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #152
ptx wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, not really. The first three criteria of the Open Source Definition [0] are essentially freedoms 1–3 of the Free Software Definition [1] and freedom 0 more or less maps to criteria 5 and 6.

The mainstream FOSS licenses (GPL, BSD, Apache2, etc.) are all included both in the official list of open source licenses [2] and the official list of free software licenses [3], so these licenses are both open source licenses and free software licenses. These lists might have some minor differences, but they share a substantial subset and the definitions broadly speaking define the same thing.

[0] https://opensource.org/osd/

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

[2] https://opensource.org/licenses/

[3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#162

Post by pjmlp »

brand wrote: post #21
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…

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.

Governance alone doesn't help, if there isn't a way to pay the bills.

It was cool to be a UNIX/FOSS zealot during the late 90's while still getting monetary support.

Writing M$ on the email signature and such.

Eventually I had to find a way to pay my bills.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#163

Post by davidgerard »

tombert wrote: post #42
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.

Honestly I didn't even know that OpenOffice was even ostensibly maintained anymore. I've not heard of anyone using it in about a decade.

It gets millions of downloads, putting users in danger who mistakenly think anyone is still maintaining this thing.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#164

Post by SoftTalker »

owlstuffing wrote: post #79
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?

> 3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just being minimally kept alive? The post is about the fact that it is _deceptively_ minimally kept alive. A significant part of the decision process involving OSS choice is measuring active maintenance. Surely, these commits exist to give a false impression here, which down the road can harm those using unmaintained software.

How is it deceptive? Are they bumping version numbers? Are they packaging new releases?

Edit: before I'm accused of not reading the article, I did, but I did not look at the actual OpenOffice download page. The current release, dated April 2023, includes the following, which seems substantially more than "whitespace cleanup" as TFA author claims, but seems quite in line with software that is being maintained but not actively developed:

Other Improvements/Enhancements

    Writer: Dialog "Frame" in Writer / automatic size / changing shortcut keys (German)
    Calc: Protect Table – Dialog too narrow for German heading string
    Base: Dialog text in "Datenbank austauschen" (exchange database) dialog is cut (German)
    Calc: Use the existing icon for "Remove Filter" in toolbar and menu
    Calc: Text in cell comments is more readable
    Calc: Added support for Excel 2010s DateTime type cells.
Bug Fixes

    Calc: Rich text cells imported from XLSX files have their contents duplicated
    Several fixes for importing OOXML documents
        All applications: Import fails when the Relationship "Target" attribute in _rels/.rels has superfluous slashes
        Calc: XLSX with omitted cell references opens with empty cells
        Calc: no text imported from XSLX when xl/sharedStrings.xml has wrong case
    Several fixes for importing MS Excel 2003 SpreadsheetML files

        Calc: ss:DateTime cell value is loaded as either only a date or a time

        Calc: fractional seconds are silently ignored during import

        Calc: cell with ss:MergeAcross="0" gets an extra empty cell to the right

        Calc: import corrupts references to columns that are multiples of 26 (eg. Z)
    Writer: Importing apostrophes from HTML fails
    Calc: Cut-and-paste between spreadsheets causes incorrect cell reference changes
    Writer: Awkward Chinese (ZH-TW) numbering suffix when importing RTF document
    Calc: Last CSV line is silently lost on import if last field is quoted and end-of-file is reached before closing quote

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#165

Post by davidgerard »

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?

> 3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just being minimally kept alive?

The pretense that this project is alive and not a zombie puts millions of users in danger who are downloading insecure trash under the impression that this is a live project that's the OpenOffice they've heard so much about.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#166

Post by mindcrime »

rbowen wrote: post #122
addicted wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And in addition, simply by virtue of going through the Incubator at all, these projects ensure that the source code is available under a well known, well understood, popular, ALv2 license - and the code, email archives, and other artifacts that were created are preserved by the ASF even when the project is sent to the Attic. This is still a net good for the world in general, IMO.

And while it's not exactly common there have been forks of Attic'd projects outside of the ASF that went on to be useful to people.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#167

Post by davidgerard »

cratermoon wrote: post #48
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.

> 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…

Remembering when I spent three days compiling OOo from FreeBSD ports, to get a build that didn't work, then discovering that this was a known broken port. I started using the Linux binary in emulation instead.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#168

Post by davidgerard »

rbowen wrote: post #141
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…

> So to characterize the ASF as "kicking this can down the road" for some kind of inscrutable motivation is just not how things work.

AOO being moribund has come up at ASF board meetings, and they really did just kick this can down the road.

like c'mon, you're literally an ASF guy, you should know this happened

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#169

Post by ementally »

ghusto wrote: post #144

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.

>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

How about you show it? lmao

Can't believe that this is even a comment.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#170

Post by londons_explore »

brand wrote: post #21
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…

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.

> value of governance in OSS

You are assuming that a strict and stable governance model is good for OSS.

But often it is the least stable projects with lots of hostile forks and huge mailing list arguments which turn out to be the most successful projects.

Strict and stable governance model is perhaps dull and turns away contributors who feel they will never get to the top of such a stable project with long timelines and complex procedures for everything.

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