[HN Gopher] Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?
___________________________________________________________________
Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?
Author : tslocum
Score : 288 points
Date : 2023-09-25 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rocket9labs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rocket9labs.com)
| KirillPanov wrote:
| > we find that whitespace changes are not just part of the
| commits that Apache Open Office has been receiving, whitespace
| changes make up a substantial amount of the commits added to the
| repository.
|
| wat.
| shaftoe wrote:
| It appears to be true.
| https://github.com/apache/openoffice/activity
| laurent123456 wrote:
| All these commits are so strange. They are all useless "clean
| up" commits yet they are not done by a bot, there's someone
| manually making these changes every few days, almost every
| day actually.
|
| 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.
| yifanl wrote:
| Mostly to me, it shows the importance of a sane lint/format
| step in the pre-commit hook, it prevents engineers spending
| an near-infinite amount of time on this type of cleanup.
| yankput wrote:
| It doesn't look malicious, it seems he is randomly looking
| and fixing the codebase and the ASF lets him because who
| cares.
| foldr wrote:
| I don't see anything particularly strange about them. This
| recent commit, for example, fixes some typos and changes
| some formatting a bit. HN seems to be taking a very
| conspiratorial turn in its thinking recently.
|
| https://github.com/apache/openoffice/compare/d98be9a24613eb
| e...
| alright2565 wrote:
| Are there so few bugs and issues in OpenOffice that, for
| months, the most pressing matter is to fix the incorrect
| use of "its" in comments?
|
| 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...
| foldr wrote:
| Everyone knows that Apache's OpenOffice is barely
| maintained. That's not a reason to attribute nefarious
| motives to the person making these commits. This whole
| thread is going a bit bonkers making unfounded
| accusations about this particular individual.
| alright2565 wrote:
| I'm sorry, I missed the important context here.
|
| 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.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Unless they're being paid to, the obvious answer is "this
| is what they felt like working on"
| [deleted]
| Allamande wrote:
| As an programmer with OCD, I understand this maintainer. A
| lot of times I tidy up old code while trying to remember
| how something was done.
|
| 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.
| Tactician_mark wrote:
| I'm really confused about this. It's the slimmest possible
| veneer, collapsing upon a cursory browse of the commit history.
| Why put in the time to update at all?
| zellyn wrote:
| My guess is possibly one of those "make a commit to an open
| source repo" to enter things?
| aeinbu wrote:
| Could it be someone is hiding information in there? Could this
| be steganography? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
| discussDev wrote:
| I think office 365 killed it. Microsoft added enough value to be
| "why not?".
| the-smug-one wrote:
| It didn't, OpenOffice hasn't been active for many years.
| Office365 (and its bundling with Teams) is however a challenge
| for _LibreOffice_ , the actually active development branch.
| inductive_magic wrote:
| > "why not?"
|
| > Microsoft
|
| ...
| talent_deprived wrote:
| Thanks for posting about Apache, now I remember I wanted to look
| into switching back to OpenOffice from LibreOffice to compare.
| OpenOffice I'm hoping didn't ditch Java like the folks at
| LibreOffice did.
| phkahler wrote:
| Why do you care if your office suite is requires Java as a
| build dependency? Oh right, I see you're new here and probably
| just trolling in favor of this nonsense.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| When you realize Apache is a hospice organization
| seanhunter wrote:
| Surely if you don't like a project rather than writing open
| letters and whatnot, you fork it? That's the whole point of open
| source.
|
| 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...
| i80and wrote:
| I mean, this happened a long long time ago. LibreOffice
| inherited approximately 100% of developer effort.
|
| 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.
| ploum wrote:
| Another part of the problem is that the "OpenOffice" brand is
| still strong. Lot of people continue to talk about OpenOffice
| and look for it on Google.
|
| Oracle just managed to kill a strong FLOSS brand. But, in
| some way, the LibreOffice fork energized the community.
| toyg wrote:
| For the record, Oracle didn't kill OO on purpose, they just
| fumbled with it. Despite what they might have pretended in
| sales demo at the time, they've never been in the business
| of building office suites, let alone opensource ones, so
| they didn't really know how to deal with it. In the end
| they even did the right thing, by passing it on to Apache,
| when they could have just quietly strangled it in a
| basement.
|
| Ironically, one of the most anti-Microsoft companies ever
| unwittingly managed to do Microsoft a massive favour.
| bee_rider wrote:
| OpenOffice is a great name, LibreOffice is a pretty bad
| one. I think <Name>Office is just too bound to the
| OpenOffice brand at this point.
| f1shy wrote:
| >> He stared writing the compiler being almost thirty years
| old. That means at the time when his programming abilities
| started to decline.
|
| What is that supposed to mean?!
| akuchling wrote:
| Probably a sardonic reference to Mark Zuckerberg:
| https://venturebeat.com/business/start-up-advice-for-
| entrepr...
|
| >"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.
| arp242 wrote:
| In fairness to Zuckerberg, he was only 22 when he said
| that; it's kind of typical youthful hubris that many of us
| probably had to some degree. I'm fairly certain current
| 39-year old Zuckerberg would think it's a load of bollocks.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The charitable interpretation is that it applies to RMS and
| RMS only, and the author has some knowledge of an objectively
| measurable decline in his programming skills.
|
| The more general interpretation is that the author of that
| page is egregiously ageist.
| Exoristos wrote:
| I, too, resemble that remark.
| garba_dlm wrote:
| ASF is where software goes to "retire"; but retirement in this
| context is an euphemism for dying.
|
| 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....
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| Guacamole is actually still developed and getting new features,
| surprisingly.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I've felt for a long time (maybe even a decade) that Apache is
| the place OSS goes to retire/die. It is heartbreaking in some
| ways, they became the stewards for a lot of interesting projects
| [1]. And the venerable web server was so important to the early
| web. I am still running Apache vhosts on a few personal websites.
|
| 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.
|
| 1. https://projects.apache.org/projects.html
| giamma wrote:
| I think this is a wrong perceptions. Projects come and go,
| based on adoption, community interest, technology evolution,
| trends...
|
| 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
| mistrial9 wrote:
| those Fortune 500 funders are slightly balanced by "pineapple
| fund" !
| no_wizard wrote:
| Unless it's one of their many durable Java projects, or the web
| server that bares its name. I think some things were (are?) bad
| fits for the ASF and languished as a result.
|
| 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
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| I was recently searching around for a good enterprise search
| engine and wanted something OSS. I found Apache Lucene and so
| far I really like it. It's got documentation, a clear release
| schedule, and I know lots of other people use it. I was happy
| to hear that it's Apache because it probably means it won't die
| because one maintainer goes away. Maybe it's silly, but if I
| find a project is Apache it gives me a good feeling.
|
| 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.
| jsight wrote:
| I feel like that is often true for organizations like this.
| Eclipse Foundation isn't much better.
|
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| At least in what concerns Java projects, Apache foundation was
| always quite relevant.
| EFreethought wrote:
| A lot of the relevant Java projects either started there or
| got brought in pretty early.
| cameldrv wrote:
| A big part of the problem is that the Apache foundation has
| become sort of a dumping ground for OSS projects where the
| corporate sponsor doesn't want to be responsible anymore. They
| pull the full time developers and donate the project. In this
| context it's not surprising that these projects "die", because
| they've lost most or all of their contributors.
| ianburrell wrote:
| 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.
| giamma wrote:
| 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.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| 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".
| rbowen wrote:
| The ASF _does_ have a marker for retired projects. See
| https://attic.apache.org/
|
| 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.
| pavon wrote:
| They do have the Apache Attic for that purpose, but they
| typically defer to the project maintainers to make the
| decision to retire a project, unless there are no longer any
| maintainers.
| wiremine wrote:
| Go to die, or go to provide incremental improvements? Maybe a
| bit of both? Either said, it's a good question.
|
| 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.
| geertj wrote:
| > I've felt for a long time (maybe even a decade) that Apache
| is the place OSS goes to retire/die.
|
| 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.
| indymike wrote:
| > If a project ends up in Apache it feels to me like it has
| gone out to pasture.
|
| 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.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| Apache is kind of the CNCF of the 2000s, I think.
| talent_deprived wrote:
| > Apache is the place OSS goes to retire/die
|
| Fortunately many of us in the world disagree with the dystopian
| warped view.
| taylorbuley wrote:
| Thankfully, yes. But I still see an unmaintained project as a
| broken window, of sorts, that mars an otherwise nice open-
| source edifice.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> > Apache is the place OSS goes to retire/die >>
| 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.
| JoshuaRogers wrote:
| At work I've lovingly but sadly referred to Apache as the
| "Crazy Cat Lady of Software." From the outside it looks like
| they're willing to take on any project that someone wants to
| give away regardless of whether they have the capacity to
| provide maintenance / governance of it themselves.
|
| 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.
| brand wrote:
| It seems that "younger generation" programmers underestimate
| the value of governance in OSS. The recent Terraform kerluffle
| couldn't have happened if Terraform was in the ASF, etc.
| [deleted]
| j-a-a-p wrote:
| "Open Source" is such a strong brand nowadays, it suffices to
| claim to be open source. Even after so many projects flipped
| their license.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Agreed... We are seeing dozens of database companies turn
| their OSS into basically proprietary shared code licenses.
| And we seem to still pretend its "open source"
|
| 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.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The flipside is that companies don't seem all that
| interested in this sort of collaboration, though, nor
| should they be. It doesn't really make sense for a company
| that believes its edge is its technology to both give up
| the secret sauce and accept the dillution of that edge that
| comes from taking code from outside contributors. The
| modern version of "open source" is a natural evolution of
| the concept when this is how companies think.
| znpy wrote:
| > We are seeing dozens of database companies turn their OSS
| into basically proprietary shared code licenses. And we
| seem to still pretend its "open source"
|
| "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).
| ptx wrote:
| Well, sort of. Open source was just a different name to
| describe free software, with the purpose of emphasizing
| the collaboration benefits this gives the business rather
| than the freedom it gives users. But this "business
| source" stuff is a different thing which is not open
| source at all.
| znpy wrote:
| What you're saying doesn't make sense at all.
|
| 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.
| ptx wrote:
| Yes, basically a marketing campaign. Wikipedia [0] says
| (in part): "Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to
| look into how to bring free software principles and
| benefits to the commercial-software industry. They
| concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to
| companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand
| the free software movement to emphasize the business
| potential of the sharing of source code."
|
| 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...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Not just different names but different licenses.
| ptx wrote:
| No, not really. The first three criteria of the Open
| Source Definition [0] are essentially freedoms 1-3 of the
| Free Software Definition [1] and freedom 0 more or less
| maps to criteria 5 and 6.
|
| 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
|
| [2] https://opensource.org/licenses/
|
| [3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html
| toyg wrote:
| You can't interpret things like these out of context.
|
| 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.
| ptx wrote:
| Out of context? I provided plenty of context if you care
| to follow the links I posted.
|
| 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."
|
| [0] https://opensource.org/meeting-
| minutes/minutes20070905/
| znpy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| znpy wrote:
| In this contexts license is everything, I can't
| understand why people won't get this in their head.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| To put it another way: many startups today have adopted the
| "Open Core" business model, and it's really more about
| marketing than actual open-source.
|
| "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.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| I can't really fault companies for using this model.
| Development is expensive, and business models around
| open-source are hard. I mean, just look at what Red Hat
| ends up doing to fend off copycats. Getting people to try
| your product and also _rely on it_ is a tricky
| proposition.
| falalalala wrote:
| What does Debian do?
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Debian is not a commercial entity. It's a volunteer
| organization.
|
| In fact there's been quite a bit of vitriol about
| Canonical profiting from all the hard work from Debian
| volunteers and not shared as much of that value back to
| Debian as was felt was deserved.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I don't fault them either. In fact I'm a big fan of many
| of those companies.
|
| 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.
| soenkeliebau wrote:
| I think we are heading towards a bit of a shift in this
| regard. With the CRA in Europe and similar legislation in
| the States it will become more important to have
| "enterprise" services surrounding open source software.
| This is for example support, but also vulnerability
| assessment and similar things.
|
| 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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > value of governance in OSS
|
| 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.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| "Strict and stable" isn't quite the important feature, its
| being community-managed. Chaotic projects with lots of
| forks, and disorganized governance may be a sign that there
| is a strong community. If the chaos goes on forever, then
| you're going to probably lose people to the drama (or the
| forks themselves will eventually stabilize). If the chaos
| is short, spasmatic, and leads to a better outcome, then it
| was overall a good thing in the project's governance.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's the difference between:
|
| > "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"
| TylerE wrote:
| There are things people argue over, and things no one cares
| about.
| morelisp wrote:
| More like the ASF lost any claim to inherently support good
| governance with OOo.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Can't good-governance your way out of a stinker project.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| Of course that's possible, Apache even has a process for
| that: https://attic.apache.org/
| zoogeny wrote:
| 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 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Does it read mail and/or contain a subset of Common Lisp?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Hot take: Python 3.
|
| Totally unnecessary.
| Master_Odin wrote:
| The move to python 3 helped shake loose a number of text
| processing bugs with library I work on, that was never
| caught in python 2 with its loose goosy text type
| handling.
| JohnFen wrote:
| But as an end user, it's made using applications based on
| (or even tangentially using, as I learned first-hand a
| couple of months ago) Python highly problematic due to
| extreme version incompatibility.
|
| I now try my best to avoid anything that involves Python.
| janoc wrote:
| Sorry but that's nonsense. Python 3 has been released in
| 2008 - 15 years ago. And the last Python 2 version has
| been EOLed 1.1.2020, three years ago, after a decade of
| deprecation!
|
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| all arguably true, but it has no bearing on whether 3 was
| necessary in the first place.
|
| > 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.
| janoc wrote:
| There have been some very good reasons why Python 3 made
| those changes.
|
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Sorry but that's nonsense.
|
| 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.
| janoc wrote:
| There is no Python 4 - and may not ever be.
|
| 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.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Absolutely. Some things go into bugfix-only mode because
| their code has reached perfection for the 99% use case.
| broeng wrote:
| And then we fear it's a dead project, and move on in
| search for something else with active contributors.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Certainly not everyone. Personally, I pay little
| attention to that sort of thing at all. I don't care if
| it's a "dead" project or not -- as long as the software
| is meeting my needs, that's the only thing that matters.
| If/when it stops doing that, then I'll look for
| alternatives.
| rbowen wrote:
| I'm fascinated at your characterization of both Kafka and
| Spark as being absorbed by Amazon.
|
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| > A cynical take could be that Apache is an org that helps
| companies like Amazon profit off of the work of open source
| developers.
|
| Apache httpd certainly helped tons of companies profit, so
| helping companies profit doesn't seem off-brand.
| augustk wrote:
| Why do you think software needs to grow?
| dale_glass wrote:
| Software as big as Open Office may not need to
| technically grow, but still needs a lot of work to stay
| current.
|
| 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.
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| It needs at least a stable set of users, but maintaining
| a set of users is essentially managing the set of people
| onboarding and the set of people migrating off.
|
| If you're shrinking then a competitor is providing better
| options, or your problem space has shifted.
| [deleted]
| znpy wrote:
| > "When you stop growing you start dying"
|
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Governance alone doesn't help, if there isn't a way to pay
| the bills.
|
| 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.
| debacle wrote:
| Terraform wouldn't be in the ASF unless it was dead, is the
| point.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| 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.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| But are they web scale? (/s if that isn't clear)
| addicted wrote:
| 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.
| rbowen wrote:
| It's important to note that the ASF _did_ say no to Wave.
| It never made it out of the Incubator, because it was
| unable to build an active user community.
| mindcrime wrote:
| And in addition, simply by virtue of going through the
| Incubator at all, these projects ensure that the source
| code is available under a well known, well understood,
| popular, ALv2 license - and the code, email archives, and
| other artifacts that were created are preserved by the
| ASF even when the project is sent to the Attic. This is
| still a net good for the world in general, IMO.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| BitPirate wrote:
| Just toss it onto https://attic.apache.org/, link to LibreOffice
| and be done with it.
| Twirrim wrote:
| Why on earth are we advocating for spamming the software
| foundation with emails about deprecating OpenOffice?
| ndiddy wrote:
| When there's so little developer interest that remote code
| execution vulnerabilities are unfixed over a year after being
| disclosed (https://lwn.net/Articles/699047/) and most of the
| developer activity is one person changing whitespace around so
| the project's GitHub page has a green activity graph, I think
| it's irresponsible of Apache to act like OpenOffice is still an
| active project instead of redirecting users to LibreOffice (or
| giving them the trademark).
| rbowen wrote:
| FWIW, the article has an invalid email address in it, so
| nobody's getting those messages.
| garba_dlm wrote:
| because someone is changing whitepsaces in the source code and
| pretending to maintain a stable/done piece of software.
|
| they're looking busy but are actually idle?
|
| this smells like fraud but I ain't cooking so why do I speak of
| smells?
| Twirrim wrote:
| Spamming the Apache Org with emails isn't going to change
| anything. There's no indication OP has even attempted to
| engage with the org and be told "No, we're keeping it alive"
| or similar.
|
| This is straight to the signing petitions / harassment stage,
| without bothering to do anything else.
| ploum wrote:
| While doing that to prevent people to find out that
| LibreOffice is what they are actually looking for. (I can't
| help but think this is a conscious effort to harm
| LibreOffice)
| dale_glass wrote:
| Okay, so we've known this is happening for a while. But why
| though?
|
| 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?
| rbowen wrote:
| The ASF does not tell projects what to do. It provides a
| process and a place, and gives projects autonomy. The project,
| not the foundation, decides to keep running the project. So to
| characterize the ASF as "kicking this can down the road" for
| some kind of inscrutable motivation is just not how things
| work.
|
| 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.
| davidgerard wrote:
| > So to characterize the ASF as "kicking this can down the
| road" for some kind of inscrutable motivation is just not how
| things work.
|
| 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
| davefisher-oo wrote:
| Read what Rich wrote more carefully. It leterally does not
| come up often in that context. I got involved with
| OpenOffice once it came to the Incubator. I've put many
| many unpaid hours on the project. Mostly by supporting the
| websites and forum installations, but also by catherding on
| security.
|
| 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.
| davidgerard wrote:
| > 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.
| SSLy wrote:
| > _The most useful way to help AOO users is to shoot AOO
| through the head and send them to LibreOffice._
|
| 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.
| saurik wrote:
| I believe a key issue is that the license of LibreOffice is
| copyleft (I believe some mixture of LGPL and MPL) and so the
| Apache Foundation--which specifically focuses on code that is
| not copyleft (a focus I personally disagree with, but is at
| least consistent)--feels something is lost to the world if they
| truly give up on the one permissively-licensed open source
| office suite.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I believe a key issue is that the license of LibreOffice
| is copyleft (I believe some mixture of LGPL and MPL) and so
| the Apache Foundation--which specifically focuses on code
| that is not copyleft (a focus I personally disagree with, but
| is at least consistent)--feels something is lost to the world
| if they truly give up on the one permissively-licensed open
| source office suite.
|
| 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.
| bogwog wrote:
| That's a good point I haven't seen brought up before when
| this topic comes up. That really does make a lot of sense
| explaining why Open Office still exists, but not why Apache
| is not being transparent about the situation.
|
| 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?
| purpleidea wrote:
| You're completely right! The issue is, this mandate is being
| made by corporate donors and influencers which is why ASF
| should be a 501(c)(6) not a 501(c)(3) that it is. It's
| probably breaking the law, but at least unethical.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Then again, the Apache2-licensed OpenOffice is not lost to
| the world even if it sits in attic.apache.org. If and when
| someone wants to maintain it, it can be resurrected.
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| I wonder if there is some process in Apache Foundations for
| projects to be depreciated/wind down
|
| With lack of activity in OpenOffice frankly it might be best for
| community if those projects join forces
| cratermoon wrote:
| "The Apache Attic was created in November 2008 to provide
| process and solutions to make it clear when an Apache project
| has reached its end of life." https://attic.apache.org/
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| Yep. What I mean is what is the process of moving projects
| there ?
| samus wrote:
| Either the Project Management Commitee kicks it off, or the
| ASF's board does it. The fake activity in the repo is
| probably supposed to prevent attracting attention from the
| board:
|
| > 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
| rbowen wrote:
| No, the commit activity is not to prevent attracting the
| attention of the board, since the board does not monitor
| commit activity as a metric of project health.
| samus wrote:
| No commit activity would indicate though that there are
| no active committees, which is one of the criteria
| whether a project belongs to the attic. Dunno whether
| that's one of the metrics or whether it is evaluated as
| required. However, usually people don't try to
| nefariously keep projects alive.
| mnau wrote:
| There is literally a link in the menu named "Process" OP
| posted. https://attic.apache.org/process.html
| hexagonwin wrote:
| While it is true that OpenOffice didn't get major updates for
| nearly a decade, it does what it's supposed to do, and is pretty
| stable. I still use it as it's faster than LibreOffice and I'm
| used to it. And why spam Apache to deprecate OO? It's not like OO
| is doing any harm for Apache or its users, one can install
| LibreOffice instead if they want it.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > It's not like OO is doing any harm for Apache or its users
|
| The problem is that it _is_ doing harm to its users, in the
| form of unaddressed security vulnerabilities.
| davefisher-oo wrote:
| Most of the 14 minor releases since 2014 have addressed
| security including 4.1.14 this past February. See
| https://www.openoffice.org/security/bulletin.html
|
| 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
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| The allegation upthread
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37646366) was that
| security fixes are so slow to come out that it is more or
| less irrelevant that they eventually get released. While OO
| release notes do list security issues that are fixed in
| that release, I can't seem to find info about when each was
| found/reported so it's hard for me to tell whether that
| particular example was unusually long or not; if you have
| evidence that the process has improved that would be useful
| to know.
|
| > 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.
| ghusto wrote:
| Or the committer is making very small changes that are hard too
| see amongst the massive whitespace changes his auto-formatter
| makes every time she saves a
|
| 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.
| ementally wrote:
| >Or the committer is making very small changes that are hard
| too see amongst the massive whitespace changes his auto-
| formatter makes every time she saves a
|
| How about you show it? lmao
|
| Can't believe that this is even a comment.
| figmert wrote:
| Here[0] is that same commit with whitespace changes ignored. I
| only see changes to comments.
|
| [0]
| https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/ce48dd1f26396c7a...
| [deleted]
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| I got 99 problems, and outting Open Office as umaintained ain't
| one.
| teknopaul wrote:
| Office on the desktop is kinda 2014 in itself. Email and wiki
| replaced word. Spreadsheets are good enough. Presentations are
| better when simpler.
|
| Perhaps not much more de is needed in desktop office tools?
| IseardMi wrote:
| It looks like most of the recent commits are done by someone as
| mostly a way of learning and not for the sake of the project
| itself.
|
| https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/d2a7b3cc90e95392...
| bogwog wrote:
| Why does someone like that have full commit access to the repo?
| stonogo wrote:
| Because nobody at the parent organization cares about
| anything but owning the brand.
| prataapms wrote:
| What would you suggest for a free app with all features provided
| by a typical office suite? One option is Libre Office, but the
| interface seems outdated and most times it does not have many
| features you might expect of an office app. Is there any other
| office suite app that you would suggest?
| nologic01 wrote:
| Apache is somehow very partial to Java OSS projects (56.5% seems
| to be the current count - probably some underlying network
| effects at work) so its relevance and impact follows that of the
| Java ecosystem. Which is not dying but it is not creating waves
| of excitement either.
|
| 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.
| unixhero wrote:
| LibreOffice is indeed trailblazing. I am not sure why a
| productivity suite have to be ML/AI powered tho.
| iSnow wrote:
| >I am not sure why a productivity suite have to be ML/AI
| powered tho.
|
| 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.
| nologic01 wrote:
| > I am not sure why a productivity suite have to be ML/AI
| powered tho.
|
| 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 :-)
| unixhero wrote:
| Free and functional = relevant. It already is these things.
| The LibreOffice community is huge and really strong.
| purpleidea wrote:
| 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 required under the tax code for this
| organization.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| > 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?
| fragmede wrote:
| 501c3's get tax breaks, 501c6' don't. C3's are supposed to be
| for charitable, religious, and educational organizations,
| C6's are for chambers of commerce or business leagues, like
| the ABA which is all the lawyers.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| 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.
| yrro wrote:
| Apache's stubborn refusal to direct OpenOffice users towards
| LibreOffice has done immeasurable harm to the Apache brand and
| it's basically ruined the OpenOffice brand. A great example of
| the damage that can be done by poor stewardship.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I think the continued co-opting of the name of a first nation
| as their "brand" despite repeated calls from stake holders to
| do otherwise has caused plenty of harm to the ASF brand.
| jointhehorse wrote:
| 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.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| 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.
| jointhehorse wrote:
| 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?
| sprayk wrote:
| > Co-founder Brian Behlendorf states how the name
| 'Apache' was chosen: "I suggested the name Apache partly
| because the web technologies at the time that were
| launching were being called cyber this or spider that or
| something on those themes and I was like we need
| something a little more interesting, a little more
| romantic, not to be a cultural appropriator or anything
| like that, I had just seen a documentary about Geronimo
| and the last days of a Native American tribe called the
| Apaches, right, who succumbed to the invasion from the
| West, from the United States, and they were the last
| tribe to give up their territory and for me that almost
| romantically represented what I felt we were doing with
| this web-server project..."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apache_Software_Foundat
| ion...
| jointhehorse wrote:
| That is almost certainly a retcon - their FAQ used to say
| otherwise, back in the late 1990s:
|
| > _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.apa
| che...
| sprayk wrote:
| Hm, interesting. I guess they both could be true, like I
| could totally see myself sitting around trying to come up
| with a fun name for my software project and being
| influenced by a film I saw the previous weekend. But
| given that the documentary where the quote originated
| smells more like marketing than anything else, I would
| not be surprised at all if this were indeed a retcon. I
| wish the docu was still up.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| When Microsoft started getting into the web server
| business with the gift that keeps on giving that's IIS,
| they were using that "patchy server" as a dig on Apache
| and how more professional IIS is. The Apache project then
| scrubbed it from all their docs.
| arp242 wrote:
| > despite repeated calls from stake holders
|
| 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.
| lbhdc wrote:
| Has it? I have used both libreoffice and openoffice, I had no
| idea openoffice was related to asf until I read your post. I
| have heard other talk about how people should use libreoffice,
| but it isn't apparent why.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I have heard other talk about how people should use
| libreoffice, but it isn't apparent why.
|
| 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.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > almost a decade of enhancements and improvements to
| LibreOffice
|
| 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.
| yrro wrote:
| Back in the day there was real interest in "OpenOffice" among
| non-geeks. Governments were mandating that documents be
| published in OpenDocument format. Microsoft sought to muddy
| the waters by publishing the confusing "Office Open XML"
| format (which they then never implemented).
|
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| > which they then never implemented
|
| Isn't .docx, .xlsx, etc. all OOXML?
| yencabulator wrote:
| Try interpreting them based on just the published
| standards, see how far that gets you.
| Tommstein wrote:
| > Governments were mandating that documents be published in
| OpenDocument format. Microsoft sought to muddy the waters
| by publishing the confusing "Office Open XML" format (which
| they then never implemented).
|
| 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 as a
| middle finger to OpenOffice/Apache for squatting on the
| brand).
| tombert wrote:
| Honestly I didn't even know that OpenOffice was even
| _ostensibly_ maintained anymore. I 've not heard of anyone
| using it in about a decade.
| davidgerard wrote:
| It gets millions of downloads, putting users in danger who
| mistakenly think anyone is still maintaining this thing.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. I think it would make sense to have a big
| disclaimer on the OpenOffice site saying "No longer
| maintained, please consider using these alternatives..."
| and link to a few other open source office suites (e.g.
| LibreOffice, Caligra)
| arp242 wrote:
| But it _is_ maintained? That it 's not maintained in the
| way you or I might like isn't the same as "not maintained".
| tombert wrote:
| I'd argue that "adding spaces to the readme" is really
| stretching the definition of the word "maintained". If
| they're not fixing bugs (particularly security bugs), and
| if they're not adding new features, what exactly are they
| "maintaining"?
| arp242 wrote:
| They claim they do fix security problems though.
|
| 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).
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It seems to me that Apache started out as a general software
| conservancy, but they have become hyperfocused on -vaguely - big
| data infrastructure. They have collected many useful projects
| (OpenOffice, Subversion, NetBeans, Maven, Groovy), but those
| projects are now being left to rot. Meanwhile, Apache has _also_
| collected a huge percentage of the big data infrastructure world
| (Kafka, Avro, Druid, Flume, Flink, Hive, Hadoop, HBase, Mesos,
| Spark, Solr, Pig, you get the idea) and those are watered and
| made to flourish. Not sure why they hold onto OpenOffice and
| Subversion with a dying grasp, but I assume it 's a lack of
| leadership.
| jroseattle wrote:
| Entirely unrelated, but it's just so retro.
|
| 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.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Man that is a beautiful web page. Clear linkage, no infinite
| scroll, shape and indentation based visual flow, 100%!
| PetahNZ wrote:
| Unless you view it on mobile...
| cratermoon wrote:
| > 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, taking all the defaults for a bog-standard
| build.
| davidgerard wrote:
| Remembering when I spent three days compiling OOo from
| FreeBSD ports, to get a build that didn't work, then
| discovering that this was a known broken port. I started
| using the Linux binary in emulation instead.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| 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
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > A whole operating system (depending on what's in scope)
| would take hours or even days
|
| 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)
| eulers_secret wrote:
| Getting flashbacks to Gentoo building when I only had a
| single core. Good learning experience...
| sprayk wrote:
| I unfortunately stopped daily driving gentoo right as
| core counts in consumer machines started to go above 1. I
| have played around w/ it a few times since, and was blown
| away by how much faster emerges go when you add ever
| increasing numbers to -j in your make opts.
|
| 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.
| cratermoon wrote:
| True, but it's not the total time, it's the complexity
| involved in build process, as in
| https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Kernel/Configuration
|
| 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.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > As a first approximation, one would not expect building
| a suite of office tools to be more complex than building
| an operating system kernel.
|
| 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.
| garganzol wrote:
| But still, the site is reasonably usable even by today's
| standards.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| Some would say in spite of today's standards.
| giamma wrote:
| I think the history recap is somewhat incomplete.
|
| 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....
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Both your links go to the same article.
| giamma wrote:
| Thank you for pointing out, I fixed the first link.
| jonathaneunice wrote:
| At about the same Sun, Oracle, IBM et al were cooling on the
| idea of developing comprehensive office software suites
| (~2008-2012), online suites like Google Workspace and Zoho were
| arriving in force, as were supporting do-business-online-not-
| on-the-desktop tools like Wrike.
|
| 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.
| znpy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I mean... can you blame them? I would have forked too, if
| anything out of caution. The lawnmower has no feeling.
| sparrc wrote:
| 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?
| owlstuffing wrote:
| > 3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just
| being minimally kept alive?
|
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| How is it deceptive? Are they bumping version numbers? Are
| they packaging new releases?
|
| 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.
|
| Bug Fixes 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 quote
| davidgerard wrote:
| > 3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just
| being minimally kept alive?
|
| The 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.
| samus wrote:
| It damages both the Apache and OpenOffice brands. People who
| have heard of MS Office alternatives have probably OpenOffice
| in their mind and will attempt to use it. They will probably be
| dissatisfied and have a bad impression of OpenOffice, Apache,
| and OpenSource in general.
| purpleidea wrote:
| > one of the most significant OSS orgs in the world
|
| They haven't been relevant for years.
| sparrc wrote:
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Many of the cloud services you use are backed by one or
| more Apache projects.
|
| 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.
| Twirrim wrote:
| https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server
|
| 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.
| einstand wrote:
| ASF rules require a report from the PMC at every third month.
| There reports are written by the Project Membership Committee,
| and checked by the Board. (I know that they really read them).
|
| 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...
| paxys wrote:
| My guess is someone is making all these pointless commits so they
| can put "Open Office contributor" on their resume.
| Condition1952 wrote:
| 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.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| It depends on what features you need. Libre Office is a suite
| with database, word processor, spreadsheet, Abiword is just a
| word processor, WordGrinder is terminal based program
| specifically for first drafts that can export to ODT, HTML,
| etc., O20.Word is a clone of MS Word 2019, there are more:
| Calligrawords, Focuswriter, etc.
|
| Abiword is probably the best compromise between simplicity,
| familiarity, and features. It's also very lightweight.
|
| You should also consider Emacs Org-mode.
| hollerith wrote:
| >> _WYSIWYG_ text processor
|
| >Emacs Org-mode
|
| How is org mode WYSIWYG?
| cpach wrote:
| KDE has Calligra: https://calligra.org
|
| TeXmacs is another option: https://www.texmacs.org (NB, despite
| the name it doesn't use code from neither Emacs nor TeX)
| whalesalad wrote:
| Libreoffice.
| bee_rider wrote:
| You can try LibreOffice like all the other comments said, but
| WYSIWYG is just inherently frustrating and imprecise I think.
| ye-olde-sysrq wrote:
| OpenOffice is a zombie living on the old name alone.
| LibreOffice is the "new" (it's like over a decade old i think)
| current one and e.g. ships preinstalled on big ubuntu images,
| for instance.
| beanaroo wrote:
| Additionally, there is
| https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors
|
| I personally find it a bit easier to use with better docx
| support.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I wonder what would happen if someone just bought openoffice.net
| and tried to get the top slot on Google for "open office". Would
| Apache sue? Or would they be appropriately ashamed into doing
| nothing?
| yankput wrote:
| OpenOffice is dead but who cares? ASF doesn't really spend any
| funds on it, it doesn't eat away any attention, doesn't really
| fork the community because nobody really cares about ooo, at
| least there is something stable there. I don't know, there are
| things that gets me from my chair more.
|
| 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
| monocasa wrote:
| One issue is that OpenOffice has had unfixed remote code
| execution vulnerabilities for years, but won't shepherd it's
| users to the actually maintained version, while still
| pretending to be under active maintenance itself in what's a
| hop, skip, and a jump away from fraud IMO.
| yankput wrote:
| yeah that's a good point
| mnau wrote:
| Meh, cyber resilience act will kill it. Two or three years
| and it's gone.
|
| Shipping a product with known security vulnerability is not
| only forbidden, it's also explicitly something manufacturer
| will be liable for.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Isn't that just in Europe? They can forbid whatever they
| want, good luck stopping an open source project from
| getting installed because of security reasons lol
|
| I guess it won't be prepacked in distros but I'm not sure
| any distro still ships with OO.
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