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Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

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Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#191

Post by ptx »

znpy wrote: post #178
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.

What you’re saying doesn’t make sense at all. If that was true that would have been just some marketing campaign. There would have been no need to divert the attention from the free software foundation.

Yes, basically a marketing campaign. Wikipedia [0] says (in part): "Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring free software principles and benefits to the commercial-software industry. They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the free software movement to emphasize the business potential of the sharing of source code."

In other words, we had a thing that would benefit everyone in many ways, but some people didn't like the marketing message of "users deserve these rights!" so a complementary marketing message of "cheaper and higher-quality software through collaboration!" was needed to reach that group.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#192

Post by soenkeliebau »

softwaredoug wrote: post #181
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think we are heading towards a bit of a shift in this regard. With the CRA in Europe and similar legislation in the States it will become more important to have "enterprise" services surrounding open source software. This is for example support, but also vulnerability assessment and similar things.

I may be mistaken here, but I think we will see pure functionality become less important to enterprise customers, which might (maybe not, but one can hope) proper open source business models more viable again.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#193

Post by toyg »

ptx wrote: post #161
mixmastamyk wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't interpret things like these out of context.

OSS as a term was created at a time when free software, as defined by GNU, was effectively becoming the de-facto standard for collaborative efforts on the internet. Yes, MIT and BSD were around (barely, in the BSD case), but the rising star was Linux and Linux (and the software built on it - GTK, gimp, etc) was GPL.

The industry needed a way to get on the action without touching the "communist" GPL, and that's why ESR's definition of "Open Source" was endorsed. Obviously they coopted all the existing bits they were ok with (i.e. all the ones that did not impose any extra burden on companies), that's why the definitions overlap substantially; but they are not the same thing. If they were, there would not have been any need to create a new definition for it.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#194

Post by davidgerard »

davefisher-oo wrote: post #188
davidgerard wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 y…

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

Adding myself to AOO as a C++ dev would be counter to the interests of the users - it would add to the impression that this dead project was not dead.

You've got pull requests waiting that go back to 2019. Dave, why aren't you pushing or rejecting any of those?

If I was interested in helping I'd be steering people away from the dead security hazard to the live project that has developers. And it turns out I already do that.

The most useful way to help AOO users is to shoot AOO through the head and send them to LibreOffice. AOO doesn't appear to have the devs to maintain a user-facing project securely.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#195

Post by akuchling »

f1shy wrote: post #17
seanhunter wrote: post #6

Surely if you don't like a project rather than writing open letters and whatnot, you fork it? That's the whole point of open source. That's how gcc project governance got fixed - egcs forked and made the improvements they wanted, won the argument and basically became the main branch. Some of the history is here https://softpanorama.org/People/Stallman/history_of_gcc_deve...

>> He stared writing the compiler being almost thirty years old. That means at the time when his programming abilities started to decline. What is that supposed to mean?!

Probably a sardonic reference to Mark Zuckerberg: https://venturebeat.com/business/start-up-advice-for-entrepr...

>“I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he stated. If you want to found a successful company, you should only hire young people with technical expertise. “Young people are just smarter,” he said with a straight face.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#196

Post by JohnFen »

Master_Odin wrote: post #183
AlbertCory wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But as an end user, it's made using applications based on (or even tangentially using, as I learned first-hand a couple of months ago) Python highly problematic due to extreme version incompatibility.

I now try my best to avoid anything that involves Python.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#197

Post by cameldrv »

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…

A big part of the problem is that the Apache foundation has become sort of a dumping ground for OSS projects where the corporate sponsor doesn’t want to be responsible anymore. They pull the full time developers and donate the project. In this context it’s not surprising that these projects “die”, because they’ve lost most or all of their contributors.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#198

Post by arp242 »

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.

But it is maintained? That it's not maintained in the way you or I might like isn't the same as "not maintained".

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#199

Post by arp242 »

yrro wrote: post #69
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.

Back in the day there was real interest in "OpenOffice" among non-geeks. Governments were mandating that documents be published in OpenDocument format. Microsoft sought to muddy the waters by publishing the confusing "Office Open XML" format (which they then never implemented). And then OpenOffice the project just... stopped. No new features, and eventually no new releases. And by squatting on the brand, they prevent…

> which they then never implemented

Isn't .docx, .xlsx, etc. all OOXML?

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#200

Post by arp242 »

jszymborski wrote: post #46
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.

I think the continued co-opting of the name of a first nation as their "brand" despite repeated calls from stake holders to do otherwise has caused plenty of harm to the ASF brand.

> despite repeated calls from stake holders

Last time I checked it was a small organisation run by 2 or 3 people with no real standing to speak for anyone but themselves. And AFAIK that was also the only time a major objection was raised.

And look, if you dislike the name then by all means voice your objections and let's have the discussion. I dislike the reactionary "STFU" response, which just shuts every discussion down. What I also dislike is this kind of pretence, which also shuts down the discussion.

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