Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?
rocket9labs.com
rocket9labs.com
It is also a totally unfair characterization. I mean, they still house relevant projects including Kafka, Lucene, Zookeeper, Spark, Arrow and many others.
But it does feel Apache lives in a kind of stasis, a relic of the "old" web, like geocities sites or MySpace. If a project ends up in Apache it feels to me like it has gone out to pasture.
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 Apache projects rebranded and for sale. A cynical take could be that Apache is an org that helps companies like Amazon profit off of the work of open source developers.
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.
But I keep getting told I need a "Slackware intervention" :P
Totally unnecessary.
I now try my best to avoid anything that involves Python.
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.
> 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.
That you find them unnecessary because the original code was "usable as is" for you is irrelevant.
The reasons why these changes have been done (for a developer they have been fairly minor) has been hashed and rehashed for the past 15 years, Guido van Rossum wrote on it extensively too.
Most has been performance-related (Python 3 is significantly faster than 2) and probably the biggest user-visible change is the clean up of string handling with everything being Unicode now.
Frankly, anyone complaining about this stuff today is just beating the old dead horse for the sake of having something to complain about. The same like some people constantly bringing up the Linux systemd discussions after more than a decade, even though they are completely irrelevant today.
1. It's not true
2. It's true, but it's not important
3. It's true, and it's important, but we're tired of talking about it.
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 that cost me a lot of time and really soured me on Python as an end user. I've not encountered a similar issue with any other language before, so this appears to be uniquely a Python thing.
But I don't know. I'm happy enough to just avoid Python-based anything whenever possible now.
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. The language evolves. Nobody is going to stop working on it only because it could break some old code somewhere. The changes from 2 to 3 happened *15 years ago*.
There is no reason to try to compile/run old Python 2 code today - and if you still do need it for some reason, then you need to download the Python 2 version (which are still available, if you need them but one has to look for them). But then you better know what you are doing.
If some old code requires Python 2, any somewhat experienced Python developer will spot that right away (e.g. the use of print statement in Python 2 vs. print() function in Python 3 is a dead giveaway).
>In any case, it was a serious problem that cost me a lot of time and really soured me on Python as an end user. I've not encountered a similar issue with any other language before, so this appears to be uniquely a Python thing.
I don't doubt it has costed you a lot of time but this was a problem entirely of your own doing by not doing your homework.
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. Or, God forbid, tried to run some modern Javascript code using old browser - or that old HTML with Flash and what not in a modern browser ...
Python is actually much more lenient in this regard because a major language change has happened only once, 15 years ago, with Python 2 being deprecated for well over a decade. The point releases are all upward compatible with no issues.
> 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.
Likewise C and C++ have had enough breaking changes since 2010.
With that said, neither IL nor C# itself had any changes breaking forward compatibility (aside from a very early change to foreach recently discussed here).
Also, "it depends" isn't the same as "If you feed 10 year old C# to a modern compiler it will compile it fine."
If you're shrinking then a competitor is providing better options, or your problem space has shifted.
Various dependencies, like XML parsers, JPEG decoders, HTTP libraries, etc, change over time, drop deprecated APIs and need the main application to adapt. It'll also bump into the tech changing around it -- UTF8, year 2038, 64 bit CPUs, etc.
For a project this size it takes work just to stand still and keep it comfortably buildable on a modern Linux distro.
death is part of life though, and the only thing that grows without and end is cancer (quite literally).
I don't see why project can't just be considered "done": yeah you update dependencies and make it work with new/current formats, but essentially it's done. The use case is now clearly defined, implemented and tested.
AWS offers hosted versions of each. They are not, as you say "rebranded and for sale", but rather are hosted services, running whatever upstream releases.
But to say that the project as been absorbed by AWS (in either case) is simply false. Spark is developed by a community of numerous companies, of which Databricks is usually most prominent. Kafka is likewise a community of several organizations, of which Confluent tends to be the most influential.
Yes, Apache is (and always has been) business-friendly. The license enables companies to profit on those projects. But, for the most part, companies that benefit from those project also contribute back to them, as a way to ensure sustainability. That's how it is supposed to work.
Apache httpd certainly helped tons of companies profit, so helping companies profit doesn't seem off-brand.
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.
And while it's not exactly common there have been forks of Attic'd projects outside of the ASF that went on to be useful to people.
Collaboration, across companies, not ownership by one company is the root of open source. To do that you need some kind of governance model. Essentially "ownership" by one company is conducive to quick progress on specific problems, but not collaboration.
"open source" here is working as intended. the thing is, "open source" is misunderstood by many (most?) individuals.
"open source" was explicitly created by Eric Raymond and others in the late 90ies because the Free Software movement was seen as too extremistic by companies still deeply rooted into the proprietary model.
"open source" is a nice way out, in order to be able to look cool, while not actually playing it cool.
I said it in many posts and i'll say it again: if you're require to give up copyright on your contributions and the license isn't free-software... then it's just a matter of time before a company turns your code into proprietary intellectual property.
people that do not agree are simply delusional (or okay with that).
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 and free software licenses. These lists might have some minor differences, but they share a substantial subset and the definitions broadly speaking define the same thing.
[0] https://opensource.org/osd/
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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.
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.
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 meeting minutes [0] where the OSI approved the Free Software Foundation's copyleft GPL license as an open source license in accordance with the Open Source Definition: "The Open Source Initiative is pleased to announce that, based on broad review and acceptance by both the Board and the community, it has confirmed that GPLv3 and LGPLv3 both conform to the Open Source Definition."
But if you take a look at the Free Software Foundation's list [0] of Free Software licenses, you will see that it lists both the CDDL and the MPL as Free Software according to the Free Software Definition.
So why should a new definition have been needed to allow these licenses when they are already allowed by the old definition? Maybe you could supply some of that context you were talking about?
> So why should a new definition have been needed to allow these licenses when they are already allowed by the old definition?
Maybe you should ask the founders of OSI? If their work was fundamentally pointless, why did they do it? Because it wasn't pointless, it was seen as necessary to be able to say "we are Good Guys, but not like them dirty GPL hippies".
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.
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...
"Open Core" means they open-source the core of their product portfolio, core which some enterprising people may use to develop applications on, but for others will really need the buy into the rest of the portfolio to get the best use out of.
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 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.
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 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.
I think this usually doesn't really have to do with Canonical at all, but with third party developers only testing against and building for Ubuntu.
It was cool to be a UNIX/FOSS zealot during the late 90's while still getting monetary support.
Writing M$ on the email signature and such.
Eventually I had to find a way to pay my bills.
You can even develop commercial software and still support FOSS. This isn't some think the kids of the 90s do. Most new open source projects are created by younger developers.
Younger developers are re-discovering public domain and shareware, while rebranding them as open core.
To me, many of the elements of political interest with free software in general don't really come into play with games (although some incidental issues, like privacy concerns, certainly do come into play in practice). Part of what makes software freedom urgent where it matters most is a very material dependency on software— it matters most when we depend on that software to make our livings, or to access medical care, or to access education. The stakes are lower for games, and I imagine that many people who care deeply about free software are still comfortable buying and running proprietary games. I know I am.
I don't think there's a serious problem with making/selling proprietary games, either, even if you're generally committed to free software.
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 and complex procedures for everything.
> "Ask bob on discord and he'll give you commit access to the repo"
and:
> "First you need to fill out the CLA and send 3 pull requests before you can then apply for committer access at the bi-monthly steering group committee. Present your case in an email to them at least 28 days beforehand, and make sure an existing committer seconds it"
There are still a lot of projects at Apache.
Check their last annual report [1], especially the sponsors and the statistics sections.
[1] https://apache.org/foundation/docs/FY2023AnnualReport.pdf
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.
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.
Software projects have a natural lifecycle, and since we've been around for almost 30 years, there's going to be a number of projects in that state.
However, the ASF doesn't force projects into the attic while they still have a community around them. OpenOffice is an edge case - there's still a project community, primarily around templates and other end-user-centric activities. They're just not doing much with the actual software any more.
Granted, there's room to disagree as to whether 1) the ASF should force projects into the attic and 2) whether OO actually has an active community. But the Foundation's position is that this is the decision of the project, not one to be forced top-down by the Board.
Some projects are going to die, and I don't think that's the fault of the organization behind it. I'd love to see a more detailed analysis of all the current projects at Apache, and their growth/decline, and a breakdown of _why_ they're growing or declining. Maybe Apache is the problem, maybe it isn't.
Fortunately many of us in the world disagree with the dystopian warped view.
They would still be doing everyone a favor if they shut down OpenOffice completely and hand the trademark over to The Document Foundation. The name is better than LibreOffice, and the fact that a grossly outdated version of OpenOffice is what people will be finding is detrimental to the project. Most the developers and the code have moved on, but the name and a bunch of old code lives on with ASF for no good reason. Seriously there is NO reason for it except the completely selfish (and harmful to others) excuse that ASF can claim to be the stewards of OpenOffice. In my dystopian imaginary world they are even paid to maintain this situation to prevent more widespread adoption of LibreOffice.
Of course some of their projects die. That's OSS. But that's not something you can solve for. Even paid software goes away after awhile.
It's a bit too strong as others have pointed out that there are very active projects under the Apache umbrella. But I do feel that there's a core of truth in this. Specifically, Apache does appear to provide a "way out" for large enterprise customers that want to dump non-strategic (to them) code somewhere and not necessarily invest in it. Seems something that could be solvable on the ASF side by having additional criteria before accepting projects, and maybe require a certain level of activity for continued membership.
If you do a lot of development in the JVM ecosystem though you’ll find there’s a lot of ASF projects that are actively used and maintained
There are many Apache Foundation projects that are active and important or complete and important.
Unfortunately OpenOffice is not any of the above, and it was that way almost from the beginning. The original OO community largely went with LibreOffice. They did not like the interference of Oracle and later IBM in their project's governance. So, Apache got the trademarks from Oracle and a community of people who were largely not maintainers. This put Apache, almost from day one, in position to be competing with the community of one of their own projects.
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.
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.
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 trial with Google over Java/Android, inherited MySQL and almost killed it, inherited OpenOffice and the future did not look bright anymore [2, in German]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130927072255/https://lwn.net/A...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20131024094250/http://www.heise....
If the OpenOffice kerfuffles weren't sapping enough energy out of the ecosystem, that users could suddenly use free, no-install-ever, not-equivalent-but-still-fine online tools did the rest.
Used to be an enthusiastic OpenOffice and LibreOffice user and developer—not of the core tools, but as part of bigger document processing and publishing workflows. Even presented at the OpenOffice Conference in 2007 (Moit de gust, Barcelona!) But after Google Docs, Sheets, etc. ... have not needed OpenOffice or LibreOffice nor used them in anger for over a decade.
I mean... can you blame them? I would have forked too, if anything out of caution. The lawnmower has no feeling.
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.
And "doesn't really change much" is not a bad thing, it's an okay preference to have. I'd be perfectly happy using Opera 12 from 2012 – "warts and all" – with some minor changes (it actually runs fairly well today, with the major problem being lack of CSS variables, JS template strings, and a few other relatively minor additions).
All they did was reuse a name. What's the problem?
More than can fit in an HN comment, entire cultures were destroyed. This was through disease, war, imprisonment, and outright repression. "Apache" is an identity that some still hold on to after this genocide. And someone saw this history, thought what these people went through "romantically represented" his web server project, and took on the name.
If you don't see how this is any different from calling your company Apple so you show up ahead of Atari in the phone book, I don't know what to tell you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apache_Software_Foundation...
> Why the name "Apache"?
> A cute name which stuck. Apache is "A PAtCHy server". It was based on some existing code and a series of "patch files".
https://web.archive.org/web/19970106233141/http://www.apache...
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.
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.
And then OpenOffice the project just... stopped. No new features, and eventually no new releases. And by squatting on the brand, they prevented that momentum from transferring to LibreOffice.
Isn't .docx, .xlsx, etc. all OOXML?
Here's some classic rants:
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/03/02/On-OOXML
https://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070123071154671#E...
(especially in combination with: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070123071154671#E... )
And don't forget, bought off standardization organizations around the world to have it declared a "standard." I wonder if LibreOffice should come out with a LibreDocument format to combat the confusion between ODF and OOXML and to further distance itself from OpenOffice (and as a middle finger to OpenOffice/Apache for squatting on the brand).
ASF is where projects go to die.
Because there is almost a decade of enhancements and improvements to LibreOffice that are not present in OpenOffice. It's simply a better tool suite and there is no disputing that. If you try you'd be trolling.
including, very notably, LibreOffice speaks the current ODF formats and of course the Apache OpenOffice from 2014 (yes, that's the last time they released a new minor version of their software everything since then is just patch fixes) does not.
https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/d2a7b3cc90e95392...
> https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/d2a7b3cc90e95392...
From that link:
> Most of the commits here seams to be mainly white space changes to random files.
It might not be "learning" but rather an attempt to game GitHub (e.g. rack up a lot of commits to important-sounding repos). My understanding is go around using automated tools to submit PRs that fix whitespace and typos in order to do that.
The trunk branch, the Bugzilla list, the OS/2 support, the user forums, the multi-hour build process, the XHTML 1.0 compliant badge on the https://www.openoffice.org/ homepage .....
Reminds me of the good old days.
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, taking all the defaults for a bog-standard build.
Building large software is consistently the only useful thing I can do that will fully utilize all CPU resources. Seeing all the bars in the red in htop on a box with a lot of threads doesn't get old.
I'm sure a full OS can take that long (ex. Windows, probably), but at least NetBSD can build a whole OS from source quite quickly. (Of course, NetBSD makes an effort to optimize that process; their build.sh is really a thing of beauty)
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 with all the dependencies.
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.
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?
They haven't been relevant for years.
So name the projects being used and not the dollars flowing to ASF. Also this is completely orthogonal to the fact that they keep OpenOffice "alive" strictly selfishly for their own benefit and to the detriment of LibreOffice.
Apache HTTPd accounts for nearly a third of the webservers in use on the internet today.
Apache Arrow underpins a swathe of datascience tooling, as does Apache Parquet.
Then there's Apache Kafka, and Apache Hadoop, naturally.
Apache Maven is still the predominant tool for doing Java compilation, and in the Java space lets not forget such things as Log4J, where we saw absolute chaos a couple of years ago caused by those vulnerabilities in it. Most of the cloud services you interact with, especially at Amazon, are written in Java.
The list of crucial projects leveraged by the wider industry goes on and on and on.
Yes, Apache seems to end up as a dumping ground for an awful lot of open source projects, but that's not all it is.
The post is about the fact that it is _deceptively_ minimally kept alive.
A significant part of the decision process involving OSS choice is measuring active maintenance. Surely, these commits exist to give a false impression here, which down the road can harm those using unmaintained software.
Edit: before I'm accused of not reading the article, I did, but I did not look at the actual OpenOffice download page. The current release, dated April 2023, includes the following, which seems substantially more than "whitespace cleanup" as TFA author claims, but seems quite in line with software that is being maintained but not actively developed:
Other Improvements/Enhancements
Writer: Dialog "Frame" in Writer / automatic size / changing shortcut keys (German)
Calc: Protect Table – Dialog too narrow for German heading string
Base: Dialog text in "Datenbank austauschen" (exchange database) dialog is cut (German)
Calc: Use the existing icon for "Remove Filter" in toolbar and menu
Calc: Text in cell comments is more readable
Calc: Added support for Excel 2010s DateTime type cells.
Calc: Rich text cells imported from XLSX files have their contents duplicated
Several fixes for importing OOXML documents
All applications: Import fails when the Relationship "Target" attribute in _rels/.rels has superfluous slashes
Calc: XLSX with omitted cell references opens with empty cells
Calc: no text imported from XSLX when xl/sharedStrings.xml has wrong case
Several fixes for importing MS Excel 2003 SpreadsheetML files
Calc: ss:DateTime cell value is loaded as either only a date or a time
Calc: fractional seconds are silently ignored during import
Calc: cell with ss:MergeAcross="0" gets an extra empty cell to the right
Calc: import corrupts references to columns that are multiples of 26 (eg. Z)
Writer: Importing apostrophes from HTML fails
Calc: Cut-and-paste between spreadsheets causes incorrect cell reference changes
Writer: Awkward Chinese (ZH-TW) numbering suffix when importing RTF document
Calc: Last CSV line is silently lost on import if last field is quoted and end-of-file is reached before closing quoteThe pretense that this project is alive and not a zombie puts millions of users in danger who are downloading insecure trash under the impression that this is a live project that's the OpenOffice they've heard so much about.
First, I don't understand what's the ASF's position here. Do they have some political reason to keep kicking this can down the road? Is there money on the line? Is it just somebody refusing to give up?
And given the licensing allows, why don't they rebrand LibreOffice, rather than keeping a zombie of a project?
Or why don't they just make some sort of deal with LibreOffice?
The pointless commits combined with the lack of transparency feel a bit nefarious. I wonder if it's more about personal drama between the projects than anything else?
And here I thought they were just against OpenOffice, this interpretation pits them against Free Software more generally. I'm gonna run with that for a while and see how it fits.
The members of the OO project want to keep running their project. They have a group of people who keep showing up to do user support, documentation, and produce a huge community around their templates. They just haven't pushed any new features for a while. But they still are there, keeping the lights on.
The ASF is not a top-down organization. It's driven entirely by those projects. And if you look at the dev list - https://lists.apache.org/list.html?dev@openoffice.apache.org - you'll note that this issue gets raised on a VERY regular basis, and the project participants always say "no thanks."
As to "making a deal with LibreOffice", I would encourage you to read the mailing list, where that, too, gets raised with great regularity. There, too, the community sentiment is "no thanks." On both sides.
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
BTW - You can get help on LibreOffice on the OpenOffice Fora. Those people are there to help people.
I've made $0 on twelve years of work. I am currently the VP, OpenOffice (we rotate because it's a governance role).
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.
Maybe we could get some bored whitehat to mine some 0days for a few weeks, then send them all at once, wait for inevitable 90 days, and then release high+ severity CVEs.
Purge by fire of a kind.
Board reports (including project reports) are open (with 1-2 month delay, they are published only after approval, at the next Board Meeting).
You can find the report of OpenOffice project here: https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/OpenOffice.html
ps: just adding here as an additional source, I couldn't really judge the situation...
ps2: BTW, I think it's very interesting to read these project reports...
Not everyone is familiar with the nuances of your country's tax codes. Would you care to interpret that?
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.
they're looking busy but are actually idle?
this smells like fraud but I ain't cooking so why do I speak of smells?
This is straight to the signing petitions / harassment stage, without bothering to do anything else.
wat.
Don't know if he's really trying to make the project seem active, or trying to score a certain number of commits, or if he's just really passionate about cleaning up that codebase all by himself.
https://github.com/apache/openoffice/compare/d98be9a24613ebe...
I mean this person is German (their Github bio). Even if they're not a programmer, why don't they instead take the time to translate some of the many german source files to english, like Libreoffice did back in 2013[1]?
[1]: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2013/02/07/the-docu...
Yeah I don't think anyone is doing anything nefarious here, and I definitely don't want to accuse anyone of acting in that way. I have my own weird hobbies.
I still don't think it's in the project's interest to have these changes merged in, they just confuse the history & make it harder to track down relevant context.
Also, I read a lot of the diffs and even a bit of the dev mailing list, development is as slow as it gets but there is new code being commited.
Like the weirdness with “libreoffice versions” forced by collabora. (I understand, collabora spends a lot of money developing libreoffice so they want some money back on support, but it is so hard to understand those versions…)
edit: ugh fixed the company name. sorry
Shipping a product with known security vulnerability is not only forbidden, it's also explicitly something manufacturer will be liable for.
I guess it won't be prepacked in distros but I'm not sure any distro still ships with OO.
Latest commit:
https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/ce48dd1f26396c7a...
Can you spot the change?
Just because the software doesn't have massive changes (that nobody asked for anyway), doesn't mean it's unmaintained.
How about you show it? lmao
Can't believe that this is even a comment.
[0] https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/ce48dd1f26396c7a...
But we can add the current Open Office debacle to the cumulating data points indicating that after decades of both wins and failures FOSS has cumulated both battle scars and lots of dead wood. The dead wood may just be ignored or relegated to fertilizer but it might also destroy the forest in a wildfire.
Developing an open source "office suite" that is ready for the next decade of ubiquitous ML/AI is a highly non-trivial task and LibreOffice is not exactly trailblazing the way. It will take proactive, smart and effective collaboration by many actors to achieve this.
In order to continue being relevant?
Functions like search and spell checking are already basic forms of ML/AI. A productivity suite should enable users to benefit from ever more powerful algorithms that, ahem, enhance productivity :-)
Join the community, https://www.libreoffice.org/community/get-involved/
A lot of users live in countries other than the English-speaking ones, and a built-in, really great (like Deepl-great, not Google translate bad) translation system would help them a lot.
Also: functionality to tell the AI what kind of letter you want it to write and give it a couple of key info and it does the rest.
Perhaps not much more de is needed in desktop office tools?
With lack of activity in OpenOffice frankly it might be best for community if those projects join forces
> When should a project move to the Attic?
> Projects whose PMC are unable to muster 3 votes for a release, who have no active committers or are unable to fulfill their reporting duties to the board are all good candidates for the Attic.
Source: https://attic.apache.org
truth is that the Apache Software Foundation is a software graveyard; this is known but not really "seriously" acknowledged.
going straight away from the topic: why our culture does this? so many things are like this: there's a reality (ASF is a graveyard) but it's like rough or impolite to be upfront about it (but nooo, it's just 'stable' software... which may be in some cases but also it also may be dead and unused, people lie)
clearly in the ASF somebody is getting paid for 'maintaining' Apache's version of star office, but clearly somebody is doing a bit of a fraud....
I’ve tried OpenOffice and I became frustrated.
Abiword is probably the best compromise between simplicity, familiarity, and features. It's also very lightweight.
You should also consider Emacs Org-mode.
>Emacs Org-mode
How is org mode WYSIWYG?
You literally get what you see.
Type some text.
There ya go. Its some text.
WYSIWYP
Does anyone remember Wordstar? It was not WYSIWYG but it was perfectly usable. I wrote hundreds of pages of documentation using it on a Z80 extension to an Apple ][. In my opinion such a word processor is in fact more productive than WYSIWYG. Moving to MS Word was a step backwards.
I personally find it a bit easier to use with better docx support.
TeXmacs is another option: https://www.texmacs.org (NB, despite the name it doesn’t use code from neither Emacs nor TeX)
The problem is that it is doing harm to its users, in the form of unaddressed security vulnerabilities.
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
> 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.
> Microsoft
...
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...
The problem is that Apache is effectively lying about OpenOffice still being a thing, and trapping less-savvy users who aren't aware of this context into an office suite frozen in time in 2014.
Oracle just managed to kill a strong FLOSS brand. But, in some way, the LibreOffice fork energized the community.
Ironically, one of the most anti-Microsoft companies ever unwittingly managed to do Microsoft a massive favour.
What is that supposed to mean?!
The more general interpretation is that the author of that page is egregiously ageist.
>“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.