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Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

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Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#81

Post by eulers_secret »

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

Getting flashbacks to Gentoo building when I only had a single core. Good learning experience…

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#82

Post by sparrc »

purpleidea wrote: post #71
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?

> one of the most significant OSS orgs in the world They haven't been relevant for years.

They definitely are relevant despite what the armchair experts say on HN. Do you use AWS or GCP or Fastly? These companies don't provide huge sponsorship dollars to Apache out of the goodness of their hearts. Many of the cloud services you use are backed by one or more Apache projects.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#83

Post by rzzzt »

JohnFen wrote: post #50
zoogeny wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a quote: "When you stop growing you start dying" (William S. Burroughs). I am not sure I believe that the kind of governance that Apache is providing is helping to grow the projects under its supervision. Your comparison to Terraform is also interesting. Apache Kafka, for example, has been absorbed by Amazon (MSK). Apache Spark is Amazon EMR. Just looking through Amazon's paid service offering I find several…

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?

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#84

Post by bee_rider »

Condition1952 wrote: post #4

A bit off topic but what’s an easy to use FOSS WYSIWYG text processor for Linux? I’ve tried OpenOffice and I became frustrated.

You can try LibreOffice like all the other comments said, but WYSIWYG is just inherently frustrating and imprecise I think.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#85

Post by jointhehorse »

travisjungroth wrote: post #74
jointhehorse wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no worse than Amazon being named after the rainforest and river despite not originating there, or Apple being named after the fruit despite not being a greengrocer. Names get reused, it's not a big deal.

Amazon is a place. Apple is a fruit. Apache is a people. Specifically, a people that had genocide committed against them. It’s at least a little worse.

Worse how? The ASF isn't murdering anyone or saying that mass killings from hundreds of years ago were a good thing.

All they did was reuse a name. What's the problem?

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#86

Post by renegade-otter »

giamma wrote: post #56
ianburrell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apache has lots of active projects. But they are mostly data analysis. At work, we use Airflow to run Spark jobs which uses Hadoop and Hive. Apache also has a lot of dead projects that never got picked up by users. Apache should have a marker for zombie projects so people don't start using them.

Well, the same would hold for github or any other open source container. When I find something interesting on github, before deciding to use it, I check the number of committers and the commit history/frequency. Anyone can do the same for Apache projects.

GitHub is an unfiltered firehose. The job of something like ASF is to curate. It used to be that an "Apache project" meant the same as "solid, popular, vouched for, safe to use".

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#87

Post by Kon-Peki »

TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #78
purpleidea wrote: post #65

Of course everyone agrees with OP's post. It's been dead for a while. We've been trying to convince Apache leadership to kill it forever. The problem is that the ASF is fundamentally broken. It's just a fake 501(c)(3) which actually runs like a 501(c)(6) -- which serves corporate interests, and it should be shutdown. All their projects are just about serving corporations instead of the public good, as legally require…

> It's just a fake 501(c)(3) which actually runs like a 501(c)(6). Not everyone is familiar with the nuances of your country's tax codes. Would you care to interpret that?

A 501(c)(3) is a non-profit organization that exists to serve the public good. A 501(c)(6) is a non-profit organization that exists to serve its membership. So like a bunch of businesses in a city get together to form an organization that works for their common good. The business organization doesn't make a profit, each individual business makes a profit and pays their taxes.

A 501(c)(3) has a lot more restrictions than a 501(c)(6), so you might wonder why a 501(c)(6) would want to be organized as a 501(c)(3). Well, that's because donations to a 501(c)(3) are tax deductible and donations to a 501(c)(6) are not. So basically, tax avoidance by the people contributing to the organization. If those same people are the ones that created/run the organization, you might even claim that it is criminal tax fraud (I am not making that claim - I don't know enough about the ASF to have an opinion). But keep in mind that the amount of money that ASF brings in and/or spends each year is basically nothing compared to what WikiMedia or Mozilla deals with. I'm not sure that these corporations would go to the effort for such a tiny amount of money.

Maybe it started out with good intentions, and has slowly evolved to be worthless from a public good standpoint.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#88

Post by CuriousCosmic »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #47
debacle wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terraform wouldn't be in the ASF unless it was dead, is the point.

There is giant amount of actively worked upon, very heavily used software projects in Apache: Airflow, Spark, Flink, Kafka, Lucene and a lot of foundations on which those are written or use: Parquet, Arrow, Iceberg.

But are they web scale? (/s if that isn't clear)

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#89

Post by addicted »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #47
debacle wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terraform wouldn't be in the ASF unless it was dead, is the point.

There is giant amount of actively worked upon, very heavily used software projects in Apache: Airflow, Spark, Flink, Kafka, Lucene and a lot of foundations on which those are written or use: Parquet, Arrow, Iceberg.

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.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#90

Post by systems_glitch »

JohnFen wrote: post #50
zoogeny wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a quote: "When you stop growing you start dying" (William S. Burroughs). I am not sure I believe that the kind of governance that Apache is providing is helping to grow the projects under its supervision. Your comparison to Terraform is also interesting. Apache Kafka, for example, has been absorbed by Amazon (MSK). Apache Spark is Amazon EMR. Just looking through Amazon's paid service offering I find several…

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.

Absolutely. Some things go into bugfix-only mode because their code has reached perfection for the 99% use case.
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