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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I thought OpenOffice was new software written as an alternative to Microsoft Office.

Actually the history goes back way further. If anyone's curious:

- First release of StarOffice was 1985. It was a closed source commercial word processor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice

- Sun, now Oracle, bought StarOffice in 1999 and released it as OpenOffice the following year

- Oracle bought Sun in 2010, and the community fragmented because nobody trusts Oracle

- In 2011 LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice

- Later that year Oracle gave up on OpenOffice and gave it to Apache, but that version (Apache OpenOffice) is an orphan that nobody maintains anymore.

So yeah, there's probably still LibreOffice code that dates back to 1985 in some form!

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> that version (Apache OpenOffice) is an orphan that nobody maintains anymore.

That's not true. The team maintaining AOO is small, but it's not abandoned. As evidence, I submit the fact that the last push to the Git repo[1] was a whopping 42 minutes ago.

[1]: https://github.com/apache/openoffice

The vast majority of the Apache OpenOffice commits are done by two people who solely focus on manually fiddling with the source code formatting and fixing typos in the comments. I'm not sure why this is (maybe they think it's a fun hobby?) but I wouldn't consider it to be the same as if the project was regularly getting bugfixes and new features.

No doubt there have been a lot of commits of that nature. But even a cursory skimming of the commit history shows plenty of "meatier" changes over the last couple of months.

And even if one person is committing nothing but typo fixes, that's still a binary difference versus being "orphaned" as far as I'm concerned. Sure, it would be nice if the project had more active contributors, but I'd rather celebrate the folks who are contributing rather than denigrate them and the project. But that's just me.

According to the Apache Security Team, Apache OpenOffice has:

> Three issues in OpenOffice over 365 days old and a number of other open issues not fully triaged.

Do you think it is responsible to keep serving users vulnerable software and misleading them that it's being updated with pointless code commits?

It's vulnerable, there's been no major update since 2014, and now unfixed issues over a year old. Those changing typos in the source code instead of actually fixing the issues should really be ashamed.

Maybe it's a covert side-channel communication method. Keep an eye out for them switching between tabs and spaces, that could signal impending nuclear war.

Sad. I've seen a couple of projects like this - maintainer who isn't a strong programmer or has no vision/direction for the project so they just change NULL to nullptr etc.

I mean... ok, maybe not literally nobody, but LibreOffice has 50x the contributors (1314 vs 26) and 60x the commits (500k vs 8k). Apache OpenOffice's last major version was more than a decade ago. It may not be dead-dead, but it's at least in a very long coma with zero chance of revival.

I don't know why Apache doesn't just shut it down; it serves no purpose anymore.

The Apache Security Team report says it now has "three issues in OpenOffice over 365 days old and a number of other open issues not fully triaged". So it's not just unmaintained, but actively putting users at risk. It's not clear why the ASF won't put it in the Attic.

By pretending the project is still alive (it's not, especially compared to the amount of changes in LibreOffice) they actively harm the users that heard about OpenOffice and use 10 years old abandonware, instead of the modern version of the office suite that it light years away. When user meets the problem that was fixed in LO long time ago, they might decide to switch to Microsoft or other paid alternatives instead, as everyone knows them. The only reasonable thing Apache should do is to archive the repository and put an announcement that users should use the LibreOffice instead.

IIRC the first big split was with go-oo project that was adding features that were in the comercial version. Then go-oo merged with the libreoffice fork. Unfortunately some time ago libreoffice started to plan to do the same - put features bugfixes into comercial libreoffice while renaming the peasant oss version into libreoffice personal or something like that.

Totally incorrect. LibreOffice had no plans to do a "commercial" version - it's from a non-profit organisation. A few years ago, the version from The Document Foundation was given the label "LibreOffice Community" to make it clear that it's a community-driven project and doesn't provide long-term support or other things that enterprises need. (Because enterprises were getting it from TDF and expecting technical support contracts and other things.)

https://www.phoronix.com/news/LibreOffice-Personal-Edition

Both the article you linked and the disclaimer put by The Document Foundation (linked by the article) mention nothing like the "some time ago libreoffice started to plan to do the same - put features bugfixes into comercial libreoffice while renaming the peasant oss version into libreoffice personal or something like that" bit you wrote.

If anything their disclaimer makes clear:

> None of the changes being evaluated will affect the license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionality. LibreOffice will always be free software and nothing is changing for end users, developers and Community members.

Reading the page and comments the whole thing was most likely a stupid name to try and differentiate the regular LibreOffice from 3rd party versions/forks that provide commercial support. They seem to have changed that name to "community" as one of the comments suggested, though instead of being plastered everywhere it is only seemed to be used when comparing the regular LibreOffice vs the "Enterprise" versions offered by 3rd parties.

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