Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project? • Hacker News Board

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#201

Post by JoshuaRogers » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

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 work I've lovingly but sadly referred to Apache as the "Crazy Cat Lady of Software." From the outside it looks like they're willing to take on any project that someone wants to give away regardless of whether they have the capacity to provide maintenance / governance of it themselves.

While I do love the preservation aspect of it, seeing that a project is maintained by Apache rings the same "Sure, but is the project already dead" bells in my head that I hear when I see a project from Google. In both cases, the name brings the concern that a project might be on its way out.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#202

Post by janoc » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:19 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #196

Master_Odin wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry but that's nonsense. Python 3 has been released in 2008 - 15 years ago. And the last Python 2 version has been EOLed 1.1.2020, three years ago, after a decade of deprecation!

With your argument about compatibility no programming language would ever be able to evolve or deprecate/remove some features. Look at how many things changed e.g. between recent C++, Rust or C# major releases. Python had only one major revision in 15 years in comparison!

If you are using software that still requires Python 2 that's very much a problem of that application and not Python. Complain to the vendor responsible, not about Python. They had ample time to update their code.

End users had no business touching Python 2 for at least a decade now. And upward compatibility between the point releases of Python is (and has been) generally pretty good.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#203

Post by tombert » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:20 PM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #198

davidgerard wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I'd argue that "adding spaces to the readme" is really stretching the definition of the word "maintained". If they're not fixing bugs (particularly security bugs), and if they're not adding new features, what exactly are they "maintaining"?

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#204

Post by EFreethought » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:28 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #159

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.

A lot of the relevant Java projects either started there or got brought in pretty early.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#205

Post by arp242 » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:36 PM UTC

akuchling wrote: post #195

f1shy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

In fairness to Zuckerberg, he was only 22 when he said that; it's kind of typical youthful hubris that many of us probably had to some degree. I'm fairly certain current 39-year old Zuckerberg would think it's a load of bollocks.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#206

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:37 PM UTC

davefisher-oo wrote: post #177

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not like OO is doing any harm for Apache or its users The problem is that it is doing harm to its users, in the form of unaddressed security vulnerabilities.

Most of the 14 minor releases since 2014 have addressed security including 4.1.14 this past February. See https://www.openoffice.org/security/bulletin.html For instructions on how you can report an actual security issue: https://openoffice.apache.org/security We do wish to know about security problems. We are an all volunteer project. AFAIK No one is paid anything to work on Apache OpenOffice

The allegation upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37646366) was that security fixes are so slow to come out that it is more or less irrelevant that they eventually get released. While OO release notes do list security issues that are fixed in that release, I can't seem to find info about when each was found/reported so it's hard for me to tell whether that particular example was unusually long or not; if you have evidence that the process has improved that would be useful to know.

> We do wish to know about security problems. We are an all volunteer project. AFAIK No one is paid anything to work on Apache OpenOffice

That makes it understandable that people can't commit to working on it, but isn't exactly a counterargument to "the project doesn't patch quickly". Like, it's not a personal attack, it's a breakdown of risk factors, in which case nobody getting paid to care is another argument that the product won't fix vulnerabilities quickly.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#207

Post by _ea1k » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:39 PM UTC

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…

I feel like that is often true for organizations like this. Eclipse Foundation isn't much better.

Sometimes it is the place projects go when their original author wants to kill them but doesn't want to say they are doing that.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#208

Post by znpy » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:41 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #193

ptx wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> 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.

which against, doesn't really makes sense.

Stallman has repeated over and over that the Free Software movement is not about communism (despite what communist people like to say).

Most likely, the industry needed a way to get people to submit improvements and patches (essentially doing Development, QA and support) for free without having to give a way the right to sell proprietary services.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#209

Post by The_Colonel » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:44 PM UTC

cratermoon wrote: post #130

The_Colonel wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Linux is just kernel, and as such doesn't take so much time to build. A whole operating system (depending on what's in scope) would take hours or even days

True, but it's not the total time, it's the complexity involved in build process, as in https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Kernel/Configuration As a first approximation, one would not expect building a suite of office tools to be more complex than building an operating system kernel. Also, for the people saying "it's only the kernel, not the whole O/S", consider that building the kernel requires having a running system wit…

> As a first approximation, one would not expect building a suite of office tools to be more complex than building an operating system kernel.

Honestly I would. Kernel is not that big if you look away from all the device drivers (you usually don't need all of them) and has a focus on minimalism. An office suite is a massive complexity monster which skews on supporting more stuff even if it means having more code.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#210

Post by AlbertCory » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:46 PM UTC

janoc wrote: post #202

JohnFen wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry but that's nonsense. Python 3 has been released in 2008 - 15 years ago. And the last Python 2 version has been EOLed 1.1.2020, three years ago, after a decade of deprecation! With your argument about compatibility no programming language would ever be able to evolve or deprecate/remove some features. Look at how many things changed e.g. between recent C++, Rust or C# major releases. Python had only one major re…

all arguably true, but it has no bearing on whether 3 was necessary in the first place.

> With your argument about compatibility no programming language would ever be able to evolve

"evolve" and "change" are not ends in themselves. If it was usable as it was, then there was no need to evolve or change in an incompatible way.

15 years ago: also irrelevant. World War One was unnecessary, and that was 109 years ago. Whatever issues existed are sorted out by now, but that doesn't mean it had to happen.