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Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

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Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#241

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#242

Post by jen20 »

janoc wrote: post #219
JohnFen wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry but that's nonsense. I'm not lying. This problem cost me a full weekend earlier this year. I may have misremembered the exact version numbers, though. Perhaps it wasn't between 2 and 3. Is there a Python 4? The problem is that you can't have one Python interpreter that covers all versions of Python, and Python is very unforgiving about using the wrong interpreter version. In any case, it was a serious problem…

There is no Python 4 - and may not ever be. If you have downloaded Python 2, you must have done it intentionally, it isn't even available from the Python.org website download anymore - and had not been for a long time. >The problem is that you can't have one Python interpreter that covers all versions of Python, and Python is very unforgiving about using the wrong interpreter version. Because it doesn't make sense. T…

I’m with you on Python 2 to 3 being a fine idea and an improvement but…

> You would have exactly the same problems if you tried to compile old K&R C code or C++ code from 20 years ago using modern compilers. Or tried to feed modern C# code to a compiler from 10 years ago.

If you feed 10 year old C# to a modern compiler it will compile it fine. I’d imagine most C and C++ of even 20-year vintage will still compile. The issue is of forward compatibility, not backwards.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#243

Post by jen20 »

The_Colonel wrote: post #68
cratermoon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

FreeBSD ‘make world’ takes about 12 minutes on a reasonably sized virtual machine.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#244

Post by jen20 »

bee_rider wrote: post #95
ploum wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another part of the problem is that the "OpenOffice" brand is still strong. Lot of people continue to talk about OpenOffice and look for it on Google. Oracle just managed to kill a strong FLOSS brand. But, in some way, the LibreOffice fork energized the community.

OpenOffice is a great name, LibreOffice is a pretty bad one. I think Office is just too bound to the OpenOffice brand at this point.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ StarOffice was a fine name…

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#245

Post by hodgesrm »

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…

Can you give a couple examples of such projects?

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#246

Post by worthless-trash »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #227
falalalala wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Debian do?

Debian is not a commercial entity. It's a volunteer organization. In fact there's been quite a bit of vitriol about Canonical (company behind Ubuntu) profiting (for what that's worth) from all the hard work from Debian volunteers and not sharing as much of that value back to Debian as was felt was deserved.

I've always wondered about that, I feel like ubuntu sometimes doesn't contribute fixes upstream. When I hear 'it works on ubuntu but not on distro X', it makes me wonder why ubuntu devs didnt post the fixes upstream.

* I do realise that different release timings can fudge with the timing, but when fedora is building upstream versions and I hear it, its a bit.. disheartening.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#247

Post by worthless-trash »

rzzzt wrote: post #83
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.

Does it read mail and/or contain a subset of Common Lisp?

All software will eventually grow to send email. And lets be honest, if its not written in lisp, are you really trying ?

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#248

Post by worthless-trash »

jszymborski wrote: post #239
arp242 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't recall tell anyone to STFU, I'm just doing what you said, voicing my objections. The brand is tarnished in my eyes by their use of the name of a first nation. I think your comment is pretty good evidence that I haven't shut down any discussion, I just know where I stand on the matter.

I just realised this now, technically every race/group is the name of a first nation.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#249

Post by giamma »

mekster wrote: post #238
giamma wrote: post #16

I think the history recap is somewhat incomplete. I believe that the death blow which lead to the fork LibreOffice was the lack of trust in Oracle commitment to Open Office and open source in general, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. Sun indeed had largely reduced its involvement in the project in the last years, and there was the "Symphony incident" [1]. The death blow was when Oracle arrived, started the tri…

Since when has MySQL almost died? Oracle poured good commitment on it.

Well, my understanding is that right after Oracle acquired Sun it found itself with a free database engine it did not need because it would compete with its own "free" Oracle XE product offering.

There was a lot of uncertainty about the future of MySQL... The original authors forked MariaDB and MySQL for many months did not receive any update.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#250

Post by toyg »

ptx wrote: post #224
toyg wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Out of context? I provided plenty of context if you care to follow the links I posted. The distinction between copyleft and non-copyleft licenses, e.g. GPL and BSD, is different from the distinction between open source and free software, which is mainly ideological. The GPL is a copyleft license but also an open source license, as you can see on the OSI website. For maximum context, here is a quote from the board mee…

Yes, because OSS was meant to be a superset of projects including Free Software, so that stuff that did not fit the Free Software definition could still be considered ideologically acceptable. Do I really have to draw a diagram...?
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