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Comment by zbowling | Hacker News Reader

OpenOffice only gets enough bug fixes to keep it running but it hasn't seen a serious feature added in a decade. It's dead. Oracle screwed up the governance of OpenOffice and basically forced the fork by not accepting major features for political reasons.

When everyone jumped to LibreOffice, rather then handing it over to LibreOffice, they let it to go live on a farm where all big projects go to die: The Apache Foundation.

The upside is they did assign everything including patents and trademarks to the Apache project though and relicensed everything under Apache's license where LibreOffice is still LGPLv3/Mozilla Public License (MPL) from back when it forked.

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What's with the Apache Foundation being the literal farm where projects are sent to die? Over the years I've come to associate any of their project with "it's basically abandonware, avoid" which has also coloured my opinion of the Apache web server, which was very much alive at the time. In fact, these days even the Apache server project has gone silent and virtually dead to most [1], except for those that still run the classic LAMP stack.

So, why has the Apache Foundation basically become synonymous with final resting place for everything under their stewardship?

1: fun fact, Apache ran 50% of websites in 2009, by 2022 this share fell below 25%.

> fun fact, Apache ran 50% of websites in 2009, by 2022 this share fell below 25%.

Funny, I would have expected the 2009 number to be higher, and the 2022 number to be (much) lower. Apache ain't doing bad, as it turns out.

I wouldn't be so sure. Yes, 25% is higher than I expected, but there are a huge number of sites that haven't been updated since 2009. A lot of the Internet runs on a LAMP stack installed on some Ubuntu 15 years ago and never upgraded or patched since.

But very few of us are starting new projects based on Apache. Even when I have to deploy PHP for clients I usually go for stuff like Caddy which is built for the 2020s and and entire Wordpress config, boilerplate included, is less than 30 lines.

That 25% figure is basically inertia.

There are many vibrant projects under the Apache Foundation that aren't the web server or other handed off projects, Superset[1] and Solr[2] being the two I am familiar with.

1: https://superset.apache.org/

2: https://solr.apache.org/

There are plenty more. Log4j, Maven, Zookeeper aren't dead. Not sure about Mesos but I was given a book on it a few years back as part of... the SMACK stack I think?

> What's with the Apache Foundation being the literal farm where projects are sent to die?

I think it's because they accept so many project, but people misunderstand what the Apache Foundation does. Companies and researchers often seem to have the idea that they can just throw their code over the fence and Apache will have a team of developers ready to pick their stuff up.

All the successful Apache projects are those where the developers just need hosting, guidance and perhaps legal assistance, but they themselves stay on as the developers.

Apache shouldn't have accepted OpenOffice, but perhaps they where affair that we'd be left without an office suite.

> 1: fun fact, Apache ran 50% of websites in 2009, by 2022 this share fell below 25%.

Apache isn't far behind nginx currently.

https://www.netcraft.com/blog/july-2023-web-server-survey/

> they let it to go live on a farm where all big projects go to die: The Apache Foundation.

There is another similar farm nearby named the Eclipse Foundation. Well, just like Apache, they have some projects which are very much alive; but, just as Oracle sent OpenOffice off to Apache's pastures, they similarly sent Hudson off to Eclipse's. Unlike OpenOffice, Hudson has already shuffled off to the great beyond; OpenOffice still clings to life, if barely.

> OpenOffice still clings to life, if barely

It's probably pining for the fjords.

If Apache owns the trademarks, why don't they just give them to LibreOffice and end this (current) OpenOffice foolishness?

OpenOffice isn’t dead, it’s pining for the fjords.

Why not? Simply, hubris.

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