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

181–190 of 269 posts

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#181

Post by softwaredoug »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #114
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't fault them either. In fact I'm a big fan of many of those companies.

I think the fault is with the consumers. Many companies consume but do not participate in open source. All the incentives are there for companies to become vendors rather than participants (stewards?) of an open source project.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#182

Post by tombert »

davidgerard wrote: post #163
tombert wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I agree. I think it would make sense to have a big disclaimer on the OpenOffice site saying "No longer maintained, please consider using these alternatives..." and link to a few other open source office suites (e.g. LibreOffice, Caligra)

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#183

Post by Master_Odin »

AlbertCory wrote: post #160
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.

Hot take: Python 3. Totally unnecessary.

The move to python 3 helped shake loose a number of text processing bugs with library I work on, that was never caught in python 2 with its loose goosy text type handling.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#184

Post by j-a-a-p »

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.

"Open Source" is such a strong brand nowadays, it suffices to claim to be open source. Even after so many projects flipped their license.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#185

Post by unixhero »

nologic01 wrote: post #180
unixhero wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice is indeed trailblazing. I am not sure why a productivity suite have to be ML/AI powered tho.

> I am not sure why a productivity suite have to be ML/AI powered tho. In order to continue being relevant? Functions like search and spell checking are already basic forms of ML/AI. A productivity suite should enable users to benefit from ever more powerful algorithms that, ahem, enhance productivity :-)

Free and functional = relevant. It already is these things. The LibreOffice community is huge and really strong.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#186

Post by TylerE »

londons_explore wrote: post #170
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.

> 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…

There are things people argue over, and things no one cares about.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#187

Post by MPSimmons »

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 kind of the CNCF of the 2000s, I think.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#188

Post by davefisher-oo »

davidgerard wrote: post #168
rbowen wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Read what Rich wrote more carefully. It leterally does not come up often in that context. I got involved with OpenOffice once it came to the Incubator. I've put many many unpaid hours on the project. Mostly by supporting the websites and forum installations, but also by catherding on security.

BTW - You can get help on LibreOffice on the OpenOffice Fora. Those people are there to help people.

I've made $0 on twelve years of work. I am currently the VP, OpenOffice (we rotate because it's a governance role).

If you interested in helping then the type of developer needed is someone who understands old C++ and has a passion to modernize that.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#189

Post by figmert »

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.

Here[0] is that same commit with whitespace changes ignored. I only see changes to comments.

[0] https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/ce48dd1f26396c7a...

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#190

Post by iSnow »

unixhero wrote: post #174
nologic01 wrote: post #173

Apache is somehow very partial to Java OSS projects (56.5% seems to be the current count - probably some underlying network effects at work) so its relevance and impact follows that of the Java ecosystem. Which is not dying but it is not creating waves of excitement either. But we can add the current Open Office debacle to the cumulating data points indicating that after decades of both wins and failures FOSS has cum…

LibreOffice is indeed trailblazing. I am not sure why a productivity suite have to be ML/AI powered tho.

>I am not sure why a productivity suite have to be ML/AI powered tho.

A lot of users live in countries other than the English-speaking ones, and a built-in, really great (like Deepl-great, not Google translate bad) translation system would help them a lot.

Also: functionality to tell the AI what kind of letter you want it to write and give it a couple of key info and it does the rest.

Post reply on HN