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The success, or failure, of OpenOffice itself says little-to-nothing about the success of the ASF itself. Why OpenOffice was not as successful as hoped is a lon
by jimjag 10y ago
The success, or failure, of OpenOffice itself says little-to-nothing about the success of the ASF itself. Why OpenOffice was not as successful as hoped is a long and drawn out story, and Apache suffered from the ill-will that the OpenOffice community accumulated over the years, due to mismanagement by Oracle. By the time it was donated to the ASF, maybe it was unwise to think that those dynamics could be changed, but it was worth it to try. Even so, the donation of OpenOffice to Apache, and the subsequent relicensing of that codebase to ALv2 was a MAJOR benefit for the entire OpenOffice eco-system, especially LibreOffice which, as soon as the ASF did the relicensing, consumed those changes to their benefit. Which is one benefit of permissive licenses in general.
I would encourage people to look at the (open and public) discussions when the incubation of OpenOffice was debated; I would also encourage people to read the tons of other communications about it as it progressed. Instead of having "nothing to say", as this clueless poster suggests, there is/was a LOT to say, which WAS said, and done so in an open, public, and transparent fashion. Maybe all that is uncomfortable for people to admit, since it goes against their misleading and incorrect narrative to paint the ASF and OpenOffice so negatively, and for this reason it is good when real journalists keep the facts straight.
- davidgerard 10y agoDuring the discussion of the security hole last year, you conspicuously had plenty of time to comment at length on how unfair it was for people to note Apache's utter inability to maintain a secure desktop application, as did several of Apache OpenOffice's alleged developers. However, neither you nor they apparently had any time to fix the security hole. The fix being, literally: remove one file from the download. Well done.
- jimjag 10y agoThe below link as well as the (public) dev@ list clearly show you to be mistaken: https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/OpenOffice.html https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/OpenOffice.html
- davidgerard 10y agoThat's a mention from October 2015 and April 2016. The absence from board reports was brought to public attention in July 2015, and the October 2015 mention you cite is a direct response to that: https://lwn.net/Articles/650411/ https://lwn.net/Articles/650411/
- jimjag 10y agoPlease read the thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.openoffice.devel/23907 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.openoffice.devel/2...
- davidgerard 10y agoThat supplies the background to the LWN piece, and doesn't in any way contradict its assertions that this was a serious problem that should not have been suppressed. That public attention is why it was mentioned at all in the October report.
- jimjag 10y agoYour point was that discussion was suppressed. The links show clearly that it was not, and when the CVE was published (and therefore public), there was open discussion and a suggested work-around. You may not agree w/ the method used to "fix" the CVE or the speed in which 4.2.1 was released (for myself, I don't either), but your claims of suppression and stuff being "deliberately" hidden is obvious FUD.
- davidgerard 10y agoThat's literally the thread demonstrating the accuracy of my claim above that "it had been deliberately kept out of project reports to the board." That's literally the thread where they're doing that. You have literally cited something completely supporting my claim and saying "see, this cite proves you wrong!!"