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Comment by Beijinger | Hacker News Reader

It is based on the formerly proprietary StarWriter, from a German company. Later acquired by Sun if I remember correctly, then open sourced.

There is another commercial German competitor from this time, SoftMaker. I used to buy the suite for Linux, just recently switched to LibreOffice. I never liked the clunky Libreoffice but since SoftMaker refuses to support LanguageTool....

There is actually a third German text processor from this time, Papyrus. Born on Atari ST.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Division

[2] https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office

[3] https://papyrus.de/

[4] https://papyrusauthor.com/

English new version of Papyrus seems to be released in a few days.

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There's also onlyoffice [1] which recently got a little more traction due to its integrations for moodle, owncloud, nextcloud etc. I think all of their software is AGPL3 licensed last time I checked. Their suite somewhat targets selfhosted collaboration for the web browser.

[1] https://www.onlyoffice.com/

Has anyone audited/read their code. I found it very suspicous that a company as small as them would be able to deliver software as complex as it was on the face of it. But when I last checked, I guess it hadn't been open sourced yet. Being Latvian, I am skeptical of other Latvians, but in this case, I'm skeptical of running potentialy Kremlin aligned source.

For what it's worth, their server can be hosted on Windows and Linux, so somebody could make a Dockerfile for it. But yeah, in any case I'd double check for any log4j like known vulnerabilities.

[1] https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/server/tree/8f4fd3383656602115...

At least some version of it has been open source for years: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE

Latvian? I've always thought OnlyOffice is developed in Russia.

The headquarters are in Riga, but one would be forgiven to think it is an entirely Russian enterprise if one were to just look at their GitHub org.

The Latvian entity was wholly owned by the Russian developer until 2023.

> Later acquired by Sun if I remember correctly, then open sourced.

Sun named it OpenOffice. LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun. OpenOffice was subsequently donated to the Apache foundation.

Note that this story is only half complete.

Oracle stalled development, made the bugtrackers etc private, and kicked out all of the contributors and tried to commercialize the product at the time. The reason for Oracle "dumping" it to the Apache graveyard is that most of the "free" (as in unpaid) contributors switched sides to LibreOffice because of Oracle's hostile behavior towards the development community. And they donated OpenOffice because it was effectively a dead project for a couple of years.

There's probably still some contributor talks about it on one of the old CCC conferences on their media server.

If you want to learn about how to manage open source, Oracle's track record is a prime example of how not to.

That’s the example how lawyers would manage open source.

It is a shame that the OpenOffice name can’t be applied to LibreOffice. OpenOffice was a much better name, imo.

Now that it's in the Apache Foundation's hands, my hope is that OO and LO will make amends and merge back together, like what happened with OpenWRT and LEDE. Given how many years they've diverged that might not be possible from a technical standpoint, but at least from a branding standpoint it'd be an improvement.

Isn't there strong beef between the remaining OO maintainers and the LO folks? It basically prevented LO from just being merged back into OO, instead we got that years-long confusion where non-tech people would download the horribly outdated OO and be like "wow this sucks imma go with MSO!"

Yeah, I would assume that there's still beef between both parties, and I can kind of understand that. If you're getting a cease and desist letter because of some trademark bullshit for your open source forks... then I'd be pissed too. The way Oracle treated the developer community was pretty insane to be honest.

Some links for others to read-up:

Press Announcement for "Oracle Open Office" which wasn't open anymore:

- https://web.archive.org/web/20101217212955/https://www.oracl...

Oracle trying to upsell Standard Editions and Enterprise Editions:

- https://web.archive.org/web/20100924092655/http://www.oracle...

Announcement of the Document Foundation (Oct 2010, before Oracle's announcement in Dec 2010):

- https://web.archive.org/web/20101001004543/http://www.docume...

IBM being the reason that Oracle donates Open Office to Apache Foundation due to them pointing out to Oracle that their copyleft license agreement with Sun invalidates Oracle's proprietary claims:

- https://web.archive.org/web/20131207051759/http://www.h-onli...

- https://web.archive.org/web/20110603142320/http://www.zdnet....

The problem is that Apache Foundation is being stubborn[1] to admit the OpenOffice death, which distracts and prevents users from using so much better software (LibreOffice) that harms an open source image and ecosystem in general.

[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-let...

Yes, and now there are unfixed security issues in OpenOffice over a year old, so the ASF really, really should put it in the Attic ASAP. If more people in the FOSS world raise awareness about this, perhaps it will finally happen, so users become aware of maintained, fixed successor projects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice#Security

> Sun named it OpenOffice.

Slightly more correct: Sun kept StarOffice as a commercial offering and also open sourced it under the name of OpenOffice.org in parallel. The .org was quite important to them in the name.

> LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun.

The actual forking happens earlier with a patch set living outside Sun and sponsored by some Linux distros for a while. After Oracle's acquisition however the foundation was built and the name LibreOffice was picked.

> The .org was quite important to them in the name.

Apparently because, in some country in which Sun did business, someone else had already trademarked “OpenOffice”, but Sun’s lawyers believed the addition of “.org” was enough to sidestep that trademark.

I think in many jurisdictions, if someone else already has legal claim to a trademark, sticking “.org” on the end may not be sufficient to escape infringement. But, maybe under the laws of whichever country this trademark existed in, it was. Or at least, so Sun’s lawyers believed-hence, they were quite insistent on including the “.org”

It is owned by a Dutch company that offers automation services: https://web.archive.org/web/20130823152257/http://www.openof...

Within Benelux, the company had an agreement with nl.openoffice.org where the latter would include a notice on their website to clarify that they were not affiliated with the trademark holder.

According to https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1372955 it was also used by Orange UK, but that happened after OpenOffice.org was released: https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/orange-laun...

"Distraction Free Writing" with pic of rainy background - would be pretty if this is animated!

Which one? Papyrus? Don't take this lightly, I tested a very old version (>10y) via Wine on Linux. This thing was fast as fuck. The scrolling.

a 40yo code base. Eeeek!

No, a 40 year old codebase with only 25 years of commit logs. And the initial commits during the Sun releases are insane - they took a bunch of commits, mashed them together and then added them as a single commit with a log message stating what all the commits they munged together did. Nightmare fuel.

Excellent lately though.

The squished logs sounds like what Subversion does with merges. OpenOffice looks to have used Subversion for a while.

Yeah, I think they did something like this.

Sounds like my personal git repos. God help us all if I ever need to share them, but I doubt it.

Honestly, though, looking more than 10 years back in revision control is usually only for curiosity. Whatever historical reasons existed for code to be a certain way are likely impenetrable or no longer relevant.

Nah, I've often found the opposite to be true. Granted, it requires proper commit messages and code comments, but I've had my fair share of "oooh I see" moments when I encountered nonsensical crazy code. Sometimes it reassured me that it could safely go, other times it revealed a whole new dimension nobody was really aware of anymore that then got a good chunk of comment space in the code base.

Well, it really requires:

A) great commit messages, B) comments that are worse than the commit message so that you have to go scavenge in revision control, C) a single or very few commits where the craziness happened, and D) a codebase that hasn't drifted enough that this signal is hard to find.

I've had poor luck spelunking for reasons in things like the Linux kernel. 90% of my revision control effort looks at things from the past couple of years, and before then it rapidly becomes diminishing returns.

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