9 ms·

Waiting for Apache Open Office

119 points by dankohn1 9y ago

CJefferson 9y ago
With the number of publicly known security holes in the last Apache Open Office release, I feel this is getting close to criminal behaviour -- waiting this long without making a new release, or making clear at least on the download page the software is unsafe, shouldn't be acceptable (or in my opinion legal).
- bad_user 9y ago
  I don't understand why this should be illegal. The value of open source is that the code is there for anybody that wants to contribute, or fork in case people find its maintenance unsuitable. And even if the project dies, the code remains there for anybody to pick it up later, in case it has value. It has happened before, it can happen again. On the other hand most open source volunteers are unpaid and have no contractual obligation. So tell me who is the criminal? The Apache Foundation? But that's silly, since this project might have been simply dumped on GitHub. The few volunteers that tried pushing some fixes since last year? Oracle for donating the project? Speak for yourself in this case, because I'd rather have companies release their stuff, instead of locking it away. This is an upsetting entitlement complex show here. If you want to contribute, then do so, otherwise GTFO.
  - CJefferson 9y ago
    The criminality is putting a program on the internet which you know is full of security holes. It's not legal for me to set up a shop selling known faulty electronics, or even give them away for free unless I make clear I know they are faulty. I wonder if this should be extended to tech. I'm not saying they have to take the code down entirely, but they could pop a big warning on the download page at least. They are knowingly having thousands of downloads a day of software they have known is dangerously broken for over a year.
    - lfam 9y ago
      Pretty much all free and open source software licenses specifically say there is no warranty at all. All non-trivial software has security bugs. To reiterate, every program you've ever heard of has had and will have serious security bugs. If no bugs have been published, then either nobody is looking or someone is keeping them secret. I agree that Apache has behaved irresponsibly.
      - votepaunchy 9y ago
        Apache has a process for retiring inactive top-level and incubator projects. It's not immediate but it does happen quite often.
        tialaramex 9y ago
        Indeed it does. That's the process which was mooted last September. However contributors _and Apache Board Members_ chimed in to announce that Apache OpenOffice was healthy and would continue. They managed, weeks laters, to spit out a release containing almost literally just one bug fix and then nothing since. So long as Board Members pretend everything is fine the Apache process won't trigger. This has become about the ego of Board Members versus the interests of the wider community.
      - Dylan16807 9y ago
        There's a huge difference between "this has bugs, like all software" and "this has known exploitable bugs and there is no mention of this anywhere". Warranties are not the same as being misleading.
okket 9y ago
Discussion from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747 (336 comments)
- zokier 9y ago
  Interesting tidbit about the meta here: ------ > > One thing has definitely changed: the last time LWN wrote a critical piece about the project, we had some AOOers drop by to repeatedly complain about what a bunch of meanies we all were for criticizing them instead of volunteering to help them out. This time? Crickets... > ...or they are not LWN subscribers, and nobody posted a SubscriberLink somewhere they could find yet. > Last year I had posted a SubscriberLink to a LWN article about AOO to HN; I'm doing it again right now, so if they read HN and my post reaches the front page there, we might be able to see them here again. ------- I'm not sure if HN is really supposed to be used like that..
  - db48x 9y ago
    HN is not supposed to be used to foster discussion of interesting topics by people interested in them?
  - mindcrime 9y ago
    Last year I had posted a SubscriberLink to a LWN article about AOO to HN; I'm doing it again right now, so if they read HN and my post reaches the front page there, we might be able to see them here again. Or maybe we're tired of wasting our time on this public drama, none of which - at the end of the day - helps get any software shipped. I'm just sad that I don't personally have more cycles free to contribute to AOO. I have a bunch of stuff I want to work on, but my life is so chaotic right now that it doesn't happen. So I guess I share in the blame for the lack of AOO progress. I wish I had something more to tell you guys, but it's a project that's driven pretty much 100% by volunteers these days, and those volunteers do what they can while maintaining their day jobs, etc.
davidgerard 9y ago
This is important: geeks know the score and use LibreOffice for this sort of thing - but ordinary people don't. "OpenOffice" still has stupendous brand awareness. You will have friends and family using this thing! Warn them, get them onto LO! Oh, and well done to the Apache Software Foundation for falsifying the meeting minutes when a journalist came calling to ask what was up. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/apache_openoffice_not_dead_yet/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/apache_openoffice_n... Note that's not the "independent" project, but the board of the nonprofit itself doing that. BTW, AOO will probably finally get 4.1.4 out this month - they've got a release candidate for Mac and Linux, just need someone to successfully build revision 1803945 for Windows. http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg31399.html http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg313... http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg31400.html http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg314...
- scardine 9y ago
  From the article: > As of 2017-Apr-12 we have more than 214,000,000 million [sic] downloads and it is still at a consistent rate with ~100,000 downloads in average per day". That is 100,000 people every day who are downloading the output of a project that clearly lacks the development capacity to get important bug fixes out to users, much less understand and improve the entirety of such a massive body of code. 100k downloads/day is a lot.
  - dublinben 9y ago
    They're doing a disservice to their users by not redirecting them to the more actively maintained LibreOffice.
    - xvilka 9y ago
      Actually even more - they harm the image of the open source itself, providing an off product instead of pushing the progress and redirecting to LibreOffice...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
frik 9y ago
Apache foundation should donate the "OpenOffice" brand to LibreOffice!! The OpenOffice brand is still very well know, and unfortunately the current situation might trick average joes to download and outdated unsupported build, while the very active LibreOffice is around the corner.
- milankragujevic 9y ago
  Agreed, my friend who installs software and OS' on companies' computers as a job, usually installs OpenOffice. He never heard of LibreOffice and was shocked when I told him that nobody uses OpenOffice anymore.
  - cbhl 9y ago
    Frankly, the only reason I heard about LibreOffice is because I upgraded Ubuntu that one time
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    I had a disagreement last year where someone was arguing for OpenOffice because it was the project they'd used for years, and I was arguing for LibreOffice because that's where all of the new development is. I was able to point to multiple major LO releases in the same period that one or two minor OO releases happened. I don't remember if I ever convinced them, but it became even clearer to me that OO's development is the dried husk of its former self.
- mwfunk 9y ago
  This would be the best possible outcome. The whole LibreOffice naming thing was very unfortunate.
- Jedd 9y ago
  No one should do anything ... but IMO the best outcome here would be for AOO to a) highlight the availability of LibreOffice on their landing page (with perhaps a header on their other web), and b) release a final OpenOffice version with some similar pop-up or notification that directs users towards LibreOffice.
0x0 9y ago
The Register posted about this mystery 4.1.4 security fix mentioned in the board minutes back in April. After the article was published, the meeting record appeared to have been edited and any mention of security fixes removed (with time stamps in the apache directory list revealing as much) - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/apache_openoffice_not_dead_yet/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/apache_openoffice_n... It was also quite telling that when a security vulnerability in 4.1.1 was discovered, at least when checking the wayback machine the earliest security announcement was posted at April 29th 2015 ( http://web.archive.org/web/20150429084734/https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html http://web.archive.org/web/20150429084734/https://www.openof... ) and while multiple snapshots have been captured since ( http://web.archive.org/web/20150501000000*/https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html http://web.archive.org/web/20150501000000*/https://www.openo... ) it took until November 1st 2015 for the recommendation to change from "delete the .dll" to "upgrade to 4.1.2" ( http://web.archive.org/web/20151101015732/https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html http://web.archive.org/web/20151101015732/https://www.openof... ). At least until September 24th 2015, version 4.1.1 was still the latest version and the recommendation to delete the .dll was still present ( http://web.archive.org/web/20150924061922/https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html http://web.archive.org/web/20150924061922/https://www.openof... )
w8rbt 9y ago
Why did they fork?
- geodel 9y ago
  Oracle Copyrights etc.
  - TallGuyShort 9y ago
    My understanding was LibreOffice, a better maintained project, forked to further distance itself from Oracle. When Apache accepted the OpenOffice project Oracle assigned all trademarks, etc. Are you referring to something else? edit: See the second and third subsections under this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History. LibreOffice was the fork motivated by dissatisfaction with Oracle. OpenOffice code was donated, along with trademarks, etc. to the ASF.
    - chris_wot 9y ago
      Actually, it's more complicated than that. It's not entirely Oracle's fault - Sun made third party developers' lives very painful and wouldn't accept patches without an enormous amount of red tape. They essentially caused the split when Michael Meeks was forced to create the Go-OO fork where he produced a build that merged in a huge number of patches that were backlogged from the main tree. When OpenOffice pushed back (and after they completely shafted Kohei's effort in contributing a solver for Calc) they in essence told the wider development community that their contributions weren't welcome and forced the creation of The Document Foundation to govern the development of LibreOffice. The TDF then worked out how to be welcoming, lowered barriers to entry for new contributors massively, put in infrastructure like gerrit and opengrok, majorly simplified the build process and generally showed a lot of love to their developers. At this point it was game over for Apache OpenOffice, and now everyone contributes their code to LibreOffice. Which is an utter no-brainer really - why send your code to a bunch of people who arrogantly think your efforts are by default crap as you have no experience with the codebase?
chris_wot 9y ago
At this point, it is clear that Apache OpenOffice is dead. The Apache board have been utterly irresponsible in accepting Oracle's "donation" of the trademark. They were, quite simply, suckered. I'm a contributor to LibreOffice, but don't speak on behalf of the TDF. But IMO, I don't think LibreOffice devs would be at all happy with a rename to OpenOffice - that ship has long sailed and the history of obstructionism, poor quality in terms of builds, bad faith comments from leaders at AOO and an utter inability to maintain their own software has sullied their brand to the point it's in many ways a net liability to take on the OpenOffice name now. LibreOffice has made literally thousands of code improvements and major refactoring is still ongoing. If anything the rate has gone up exponentially, to the point now where we are beginning to actually compete with Microsoft Office. We are already better at a number if things than the Microsoft product - we even produce more compact XML than what is generated by the latest version of Office. In fact, in terms of product direction you have a far better chance of influencing product features in LO and getting issues resolved than you'll ever have with Microsoft. Microsoft Connect is less than useless in so many ways, it's not terribly open and I've seen bug reports that are acknowledged and sat on for years - with LO, you can pay a reasonable amount of money to a third party to get the feature implemented or the bug fixed. You could never do this with Microsoft. I think that the way Oracle went about things should be a lesson for any company or organization: Oracle cannot be trusted, and if they give you a code dump, if there is a competing fork then seriously consider whether they should be consulted and supported before you accept the "gift" from Oracle.
- fattire 9y ago
  How would the Lo people feel about a simple redirect from Oo.o-> Lo.org w/some kind of banner welcoming users, and some kind of upgrade path from Oo->Lo?
  - slitaz 9y ago
    I don't know about the LibreOffice people. I know that the AOO would NEVER allow that. There is enough hatred that keeps them going.
- mindcrime 9y ago
thrillgore 9y ago
I wonder if the other big Oracle project being pawned off to the great retirement home in the sky, NetBeans, will be pulled out of Incubator and thrown in the trash.
- carussell 9y ago
  Anything that gets projects to move off the CDDL in favor of better licenses (like Apache 2.0) is a good thing.
jonotime 9y ago
Genuine curiosity. Since I dont know much about the nitty gritty history of the fork. Who are these couple people who work on AOO instead of LO and why do they? Do they think its a better product? Better community? Brand loyalty? Money? Did they loose a bet? I'm not trolling (ok - maybe a little with the last question). I just want to know the story here.
- a3n 9y ago
  Apache was given OO by Oracle, and people in Apache then treated it as the Apache project that it had become; it didn't work out as well as some other Apache projects.
  - jonotime 9y ago
    Doesnt really answer my question. Who are these "people in apache" who cannot see like LibreOffice is more mature product? Well, what does "people in apache" mean?
- microwavecamera 9y ago
  It was mostly over the the acquisition of Open Office by Oracle when they bought Sun. Oracle owned the trademark to Open Office, changed the name to Oracle Open Office and development slowed. Around the same time Oracle had killed OpenSolaris, Sun's open-source version of Solaris, and changed Solaris back to a proprietary product. There's was concern in the open-source community that Oracle would either kill Open Office all together or try to spin it off as a commercial product. So OO was forked and most of the core OO developers jumped ship.
mcbits 9y ago
So, it appears the problem is that OpenOffice still has all the brand recognition, while LibreOffice suffers from a lack of awareness. The chances are slim to none that LibreOffice will ever be able adopt the OpenOffice trademark. I think the LibreOffice project should use this opportunity to rebrand themselves and build even more distance from OpenOffice and MS Office. Pick a name that's easier to pronounce, spell, and remember - simple English words without two vowels in a row. (What was that? Did you say Leebray Office? Libruh Office? Lib Roffice? Does this have something to do with Mexicans and liberals? We're capitalists here!) Everyone who cares about "libre" software will still know it's libre without putting it in the name. Communicate that this is the office suite that successful people use, not the one that poor people use because they're poor.
- Avshalom 9y ago
  While Libreoffice doesn't sound like a skin disease it is damn close
- pmontra 9y ago
  I agree it could be difficult for English speakers. I think there are no problems with the name and its pronunciation in continental Europe or Latin America. I wonder how it is in Asia (some large English speaking countries there though.) Africa?
  - ProtoAES256 9y ago
    Confirming for Asia(self representing, and observed) No, the mass population don't know about anything open source etc.etc. and for tech savvy and geeks, few and mostly think that open source hurts economy and are not feasible. While LibreOffice has been used by some, people are not aware on open source related projects. One might not recognise the difference between LibreOffice and AOO/OOo and MSO. Open Source related communities are either small or nonexistent in most Asian countries. Some are due to more alarming real-world problems to deal with or basic human rights(dat big country) and civil rights are not even respected to begin with. And no, actually it's the Chinese speaking country(Taiwan) that have far more recognition and awareness on Libre Office over other Asian countries and friends that I met and have online. AOO/OOo has dwindled at Taiwan too, and sure, LibreOffice seems weird at first, but understanding the meaning behind it is enough to convince a user to pronounce it. We have other weird names too. Lots of weird names. //didn't proof read
sgs1370 9y ago
OpenOffice is much less annoying so I keep using it. Does everything I need to do. I haven't even upgraded to the most recent version, the one I have is fine. Not-for-profit orgs like Libre and Mozilla have their own motivations for pushing people to stop using software that is free and works, with no ads (no, not saying Libre has ads, but OO doesn't either, so why disparage it?)
mindcrime 9y ago
Anyway, things are not quite so dire as this article makes out. See: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/openoffice-dev/201708.mbox/%3CEE94F650-28AA-4DB1-BB74-5377A3914750%40jaguNET.com%3E http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/openoffice-dev/2017... So yes, development on AOO is absolutely continuing. Is the pace slower than we'd all like? Absolutely. Would we welcome newcomers to help out? Absolutely. In the meantime, the volunteers that are around are doing what they can. I really wish people would let this whole supposed "AOO vs LO rivalry" thing go. At this point, I'm pretty sure the bulk of the AOO contributors don't see LO as a rival, and mostly don't care what LO does, so long as people affiliated with LO aren't running us down in public. The two projects will probably never re-merge, so it is what it is. They do their thing, AOO does its thing. Such is the way of things.
- cwyers 9y ago
  > I really wish people would let this whole supposed "AOO vs LO rivalry" thing go. At this point, I'm pretty sure the bulk of the AOO contributors don't see LO as a rival, and mostly don't care what LO does, so long as people affiliated with LO aren't running us down in public. The two projects will probably never re-merge, so it is what it is. They do their thing, AOO does its thing. Such is the way of things. Given that most of the energy is with one project and not the other, and codebases have diverged so much that one can't accept patches from the other, why is it beneficial to have both? Who does OOo serve that LO doesn't? And why would a volunteer choose to work on OOo and not LO if they weren't on the OOo side of the fork to begin with?
  - mindcrime 9y ago
    why is it beneficial to have both? Who does OOo serve that LO doesn't? And why would a volunteer choose to work on OOo and not LO if they weren't on the OOo side of the fork to begin with? It sounds like you expect some sort of objective, definitive answer to those questions. I don't think there are any such answers. A lot of people use AOO, a bit fewer contribute to development. I can't explain the motivations of any of those people, outside of myself. I can't even explain why so many of the "old school" OO developers "sided" - so to speak - with LO, other than just the timing of the thing. But I came into AOO after a lot of the weird stuff had already happened, that created all this bitterness and resentment between the two projects. I'm a bit of an outsider as it were. So I have a hard time understanding why there even is all this acrimony and tension at all. So I don't have a lot of good answers for you. All I can say is that, for myself, I gravitated to AOO for a few reasons: 1. I prefer the Apache License 2. I was familiar with, and liked, the ASF way of doing things. 3. I started out with high hopes to leverage what seemed like a natural synergy between AOO and other ASF projects. In particular, some of the Semantic Web tech (Jena, Fuseki), and all the "big data" projects. It just felt natural to me to want to work on AOO since there was a certain amount of overlap in membership between these various projects, etc. Sadly, I got so bogged down with other activities, that I have never found time to really contribute to AOO and work on a lot of the things I had hoped to work on. I still cling to some of those ambitions, but other priorities keep getting in the way. Sorry for the long, rambling semi-answer. I'm tired and just kind of going "stream of consciousness" here.

119 points by dankohn1 9y ago

With the number of publicly known security holes in the last Apache Open Office release, I feel this is getting close to criminal behaviour -- waiting this long without making a new release, or making clear at least on the download page the software is unsafe, shouldn't be acceptable (or in my opinion legal).

bad_user 9y ago
I don't understand why this should be illegal. The value of open source is that the code is there for anybody that wants to contribute, or fork in case people find its maintenance unsuitable. And even if the project dies, the code remains there for anybody to pick it up later, in case it has value. It has happened before, it can happen again. On the other hand most open source volunteers are unpaid and have no contractual obligation. So tell me who is the criminal? The Apache Foundation? But that's silly, since this project might have been simply dumped on GitHub. The few volunteers that tried pushing some fixes since last year? Oracle for donating the project? Speak for yourself in this case, because I'd rather have companies release their stuff, instead of locking it away. This is an upsetting entitlement complex show here. If you want to contribute, then do so, otherwise GTFO.
- CJefferson 9y ago
  The criminality is putting a program on the internet which you know is full of security holes. It's not legal for me to set up a shop selling known faulty electronics, or even give them away for free unless I make clear I know they are faulty. I wonder if this should be extended to tech. I'm not saying they have to take the code down entirely, but they could pop a big warning on the download page at least. They are knowingly having thousands of downloads a day of software they have known is dangerously broken for over a year.
  - lfam 9y ago
    Pretty much all free and open source software licenses specifically say there is no warranty at all. All non-trivial software has security bugs. To reiterate, every program you've ever heard of has had and will have serious security bugs. If no bugs have been published, then either nobody is looking or someone is keeping them secret. I agree that Apache has behaved irresponsibly.
    - votepaunchy 9y ago
      Apache has a process for retiring inactive top-level and incubator projects. It's not immediate but it does happen quite often.
      - tialaramex 9y ago
        Indeed it does. That's the process which was mooted last September. However contributors _and Apache Board Members_ chimed in to announce that Apache OpenOffice was healthy and would continue. They managed, weeks laters, to spit out a release containing almost literally just one bug fix and then nothing since. So long as Board Members pretend everything is fine the Apache process won't trigger. This has become about the ego of Board Members versus the interests of the wider community.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      There's a huge difference between "this has bugs, like all software" and "this has known exploitable bugs and there is no mention of this anywhere". Warranties are not the same as being misleading.

okket 9y ago

Discussion from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747 (336 comments)

zokier 9y ago
Interesting tidbit about the meta here: ------ > > One thing has definitely changed: the last time LWN wrote a critical piece about the project, we had some AOOers drop by to repeatedly complain about what a bunch of meanies we all were for criticizing them instead of volunteering to help them out. This time? Crickets... > ...or they are not LWN subscribers, and nobody posted a SubscriberLink somewhere they could find yet. > Last year I had posted a SubscriberLink to a LWN article about AOO to HN; I'm doing it again right now, so if they read HN and my post reaches the front page there, we might be able to see them here again. ------- I'm not sure if HN is really supposed to be used like that..
- db48x 9y ago
  HN is not supposed to be used to foster discussion of interesting topics by people interested in them?
- mindcrime 9y ago
  Last year I had posted a SubscriberLink to a LWN article about AOO to HN; I'm doing it again right now, so if they read HN and my post reaches the front page there, we might be able to see them here again. Or maybe we're tired of wasting our time on this public drama, none of which - at the end of the day - helps get any software shipped. I'm just sad that I don't personally have more cycles free to contribute to AOO. I have a bunch of stuff I want to work on, but my life is so chaotic right now that it doesn't happen. So I guess I share in the blame for the lack of AOO progress. I wish I had something more to tell you guys, but it's a project that's driven pretty much 100% by volunteers these days, and those volunteers do what they can while maintaining their day jobs, etc.

davidgerard 9y ago

This is important: geeks know the score and use LibreOffice for this sort of thing - but ordinary people don't. "OpenOffice" still has stupendous brand awareness. You will have friends and family using this thing! Warn them, get them onto LO! Oh, and well done to the Apache Software Foundation for falsifying the meeting minutes when a journalist came calling to ask what was up. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/apache_openoffice_not_dead_yet/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/apache_openoffice_n... Note that's not the "independent" project, but the board of the nonprofit itself doing that. BTW, AOO will probably finally get 4.1.4 out this month - they've got a release candidate for Mac and Linux, just need someone to successfully build revision 1803945 for Windows. http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg31399.html http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg313... http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg31400.html http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg314...

scardine 9y ago
From the article: > As of 2017-Apr-12 we have more than 214,000,000 million [sic] downloads and it is still at a consistent rate with ~100,000 downloads in average per day". That is 100,000 people every day who are downloading the output of a project that clearly lacks the development capacity to get important bug fixes out to users, much less understand and improve the entirety of such a massive body of code. 100k downloads/day is a lot.
- dublinben 9y ago
  They're doing a disservice to their users by not redirecting them to the more actively maintained LibreOffice.
  - xvilka 9y ago
    Actually even more - they harm the image of the open source itself, providing an off product instead of pushing the progress and redirecting to LibreOffice...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

frik 9y ago

Apache foundation should donate the "OpenOffice" brand to LibreOffice!! The OpenOffice brand is still very well know, and unfortunately the current situation might trick average joes to download and outdated unsupported build, while the very active LibreOffice is around the corner.

milankragujevic 9y ago
Agreed, my friend who installs software and OS' on companies' computers as a job, usually installs OpenOffice. He never heard of LibreOffice and was shocked when I told him that nobody uses OpenOffice anymore.
- cbhl 9y ago
  Frankly, the only reason I heard about LibreOffice is because I upgraded Ubuntu that one time
- khedoros1 9y ago
  I had a disagreement last year where someone was arguing for OpenOffice because it was the project they'd used for years, and I was arguing for LibreOffice because that's where all of the new development is. I was able to point to multiple major LO releases in the same period that one or two minor OO releases happened. I don't remember if I ever convinced them, but it became even clearer to me that OO's development is the dried husk of its former self.
mwfunk 9y ago
This would be the best possible outcome. The whole LibreOffice naming thing was very unfortunate.
Jedd 9y ago
No one should do anything ... but IMO the best outcome here would be for AOO to a) highlight the availability of LibreOffice on their landing page (with perhaps a header on their other web), and b) release a final OpenOffice version with some similar pop-up or notification that directs users towards LibreOffice.

0x0 9y ago

The Register posted about this mystery 4.1.4 security fix mentioned in the board minutes back in April. After the article was published, the meeting record appeared to have been edited and any mention of security fixes removed (with time stamps in the apache directory list revealing as much) - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/apache_openoffice_not_dead_yet/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/apache_openoffice_n... It was also quite telling that when a security vulnerability in 4.1.1 was discovered, at least when checking the wayback machine the earliest security announcement was posted at April 29th 2015 ( http://web.archive.org/web/20150429084734/https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html http://web.archive.org/web/20150429084734/https://www.openof... ) and while multiple snapshots have been captured since ( http://web.archive.org/web/20150501000000*/https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html http://web.archive.org/web/20150501000000*/https://www.openo... ) it took until November 1st 2015 for the recommendation to change from "delete the .dll" to "upgrade to 4.1.2" ( http://web.archive.org/web/20151101015732/https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html http://web.archive.org/web/20151101015732/https://www.openof... ). At least until September 24th 2015, version 4.1.1 was still the latest version and the recommendation to delete the .dll was still present ( http://web.archive.org/web/20150924061922/https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html http://web.archive.org/web/20150924061922/https://www.openof... )

w8rbt 9y ago

Why did they fork?

geodel 9y ago
Oracle Copyrights etc.
- TallGuyShort 9y ago
  My understanding was LibreOffice, a better maintained project, forked to further distance itself from Oracle. When Apache accepted the OpenOffice project Oracle assigned all trademarks, etc. Are you referring to something else? edit: See the second and third subsections under this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History. LibreOffice was the fork motivated by dissatisfaction with Oracle. OpenOffice code was donated, along with trademarks, etc. to the ASF.
  - chris_wot 9y ago
    Actually, it's more complicated than that. It's not entirely Oracle's fault - Sun made third party developers' lives very painful and wouldn't accept patches without an enormous amount of red tape. They essentially caused the split when Michael Meeks was forced to create the Go-OO fork where he produced a build that merged in a huge number of patches that were backlogged from the main tree. When OpenOffice pushed back (and after they completely shafted Kohei's effort in contributing a solver for Calc) they in essence told the wider development community that their contributions weren't welcome and forced the creation of The Document Foundation to govern the development of LibreOffice. The TDF then worked out how to be welcoming, lowered barriers to entry for new contributors massively, put in infrastructure like gerrit and opengrok, majorly simplified the build process and generally showed a lot of love to their developers. At this point it was game over for Apache OpenOffice, and now everyone contributes their code to LibreOffice. Which is an utter no-brainer really - why send your code to a bunch of people who arrogantly think your efforts are by default crap as you have no experience with the codebase?

chris_wot 9y ago

At this point, it is clear that Apache OpenOffice is dead. The Apache board have been utterly irresponsible in accepting Oracle's "donation" of the trademark. They were, quite simply, suckered. I'm a contributor to LibreOffice, but don't speak on behalf of the TDF. But IMO, I don't think LibreOffice devs would be at all happy with a rename to OpenOffice - that ship has long sailed and the history of obstructionism, poor quality in terms of builds, bad faith comments from leaders at AOO and an utter inability to maintain their own software has sullied their brand to the point it's in many ways a net liability to take on the OpenOffice name now. LibreOffice has made literally thousands of code improvements and major refactoring is still ongoing. If anything the rate has gone up exponentially, to the point now where we are beginning to actually compete with Microsoft Office. We are already better at a number if things than the Microsoft product - we even produce more compact XML than what is generated by the latest version of Office. In fact, in terms of product direction you have a far better chance of influencing product features in LO and getting issues resolved than you'll ever have with Microsoft. Microsoft Connect is less than useless in so many ways, it's not terribly open and I've seen bug reports that are acknowledged and sat on for years - with LO, you can pay a reasonable amount of money to a third party to get the feature implemented or the bug fixed. You could never do this with Microsoft. I think that the way Oracle went about things should be a lesson for any company or organization: Oracle cannot be trusted, and if they give you a code dump, if there is a competing fork then seriously consider whether they should be consulted and supported before you accept the "gift" from Oracle.

fattire 9y ago
How would the Lo people feel about a simple redirect from Oo.o-> Lo.org w/some kind of banner welcoming users, and some kind of upgrade path from Oo->Lo?
- slitaz 9y ago
  I don't know about the LibreOffice people. I know that the AOO would NEVER allow that. There is enough hatred that keeps them going.
mindcrime 9y ago

thrillgore 9y ago

I wonder if the other big Oracle project being pawned off to the great retirement home in the sky, NetBeans, will be pulled out of Incubator and thrown in the trash.

carussell 9y ago
Anything that gets projects to move off the CDDL in favor of better licenses (like Apache 2.0) is a good thing.

jonotime 9y ago

Genuine curiosity. Since I dont know much about the nitty gritty history of the fork. Who are these couple people who work on AOO instead of LO and why do they? Do they think its a better product? Better community? Brand loyalty? Money? Did they loose a bet? I'm not trolling (ok - maybe a little with the last question). I just want to know the story here.

a3n 9y ago
Apache was given OO by Oracle, and people in Apache then treated it as the Apache project that it had become; it didn't work out as well as some other Apache projects.
- jonotime 9y ago
  Doesnt really answer my question. Who are these "people in apache" who cannot see like LibreOffice is more mature product? Well, what does "people in apache" mean?
microwavecamera 9y ago
It was mostly over the the acquisition of Open Office by Oracle when they bought Sun. Oracle owned the trademark to Open Office, changed the name to Oracle Open Office and development slowed. Around the same time Oracle had killed OpenSolaris, Sun's open-source version of Solaris, and changed Solaris back to a proprietary product. There's was concern in the open-source community that Oracle would either kill Open Office all together or try to spin it off as a commercial product. So OO was forked and most of the core OO developers jumped ship.

mcbits 9y ago

So, it appears the problem is that OpenOffice still has all the brand recognition, while LibreOffice suffers from a lack of awareness. The chances are slim to none that LibreOffice will ever be able adopt the OpenOffice trademark. I think the LibreOffice project should use this opportunity to rebrand themselves and build even more distance from OpenOffice and MS Office. Pick a name that's easier to pronounce, spell, and remember - simple English words without two vowels in a row. (What was that? Did you say Leebray Office? Libruh Office? Lib Roffice? Does this have something to do with Mexicans and liberals? We're capitalists here!) Everyone who cares about "libre" software will still know it's libre without putting it in the name. Communicate that this is the office suite that successful people use, not the one that poor people use because they're poor.

Avshalom 9y ago
While Libreoffice doesn't sound like a skin disease it is damn close
pmontra 9y ago
I agree it could be difficult for English speakers. I think there are no problems with the name and its pronunciation in continental Europe or Latin America. I wonder how it is in Asia (some large English speaking countries there though.) Africa?
- ProtoAES256 9y ago
  Confirming for Asia(self representing, and observed) No, the mass population don't know about anything open source etc.etc. and for tech savvy and geeks, few and mostly think that open source hurts economy and are not feasible. While LibreOffice has been used by some, people are not aware on open source related projects. One might not recognise the difference between LibreOffice and AOO/OOo and MSO. Open Source related communities are either small or nonexistent in most Asian countries. Some are due to more alarming real-world problems to deal with or basic human rights(dat big country) and civil rights are not even respected to begin with. And no, actually it's the Chinese speaking country(Taiwan) that have far more recognition and awareness on Libre Office over other Asian countries and friends that I met and have online. AOO/OOo has dwindled at Taiwan too, and sure, LibreOffice seems weird at first, but understanding the meaning behind it is enough to convince a user to pronounce it. We have other weird names too. Lots of weird names. //didn't proof read

sgs1370 9y ago

OpenOffice is much less annoying so I keep using it. Does everything I need to do. I haven't even upgraded to the most recent version, the one I have is fine. Not-for-profit orgs like Libre and Mozilla have their own motivations for pushing people to stop using software that is free and works, with no ads (no, not saying Libre has ads, but OO doesn't either, so why disparage it?)

mindcrime 9y ago

Anyway, things are not quite so dire as this article makes out. See: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/openoffice-dev/201708.mbox/%3CEE94F650-28AA-4DB1-BB74-5377A3914750%40jaguNET.com%3E http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/openoffice-dev/2017... So yes, development on AOO is absolutely continuing. Is the pace slower than we'd all like? Absolutely. Would we welcome newcomers to help out? Absolutely. In the meantime, the volunteers that are around are doing what they can. I really wish people would let this whole supposed "AOO vs LO rivalry" thing go. At this point, I'm pretty sure the bulk of the AOO contributors don't see LO as a rival, and mostly don't care what LO does, so long as people affiliated with LO aren't running us down in public. The two projects will probably never re-merge, so it is what it is. They do their thing, AOO does its thing. Such is the way of things.

cwyers 9y ago
> I really wish people would let this whole supposed "AOO vs LO rivalry" thing go. At this point, I'm pretty sure the bulk of the AOO contributors don't see LO as a rival, and mostly don't care what LO does, so long as people affiliated with LO aren't running us down in public. The two projects will probably never re-merge, so it is what it is. They do their thing, AOO does its thing. Such is the way of things. Given that most of the energy is with one project and not the other, and codebases have diverged so much that one can't accept patches from the other, why is it beneficial to have both? Who does OOo serve that LO doesn't? And why would a volunteer choose to work on OOo and not LO if they weren't on the OOo side of the fork to begin with?
- mindcrime 9y ago
  why is it beneficial to have both? Who does OOo serve that LO doesn't? And why would a volunteer choose to work on OOo and not LO if they weren't on the OOo side of the fork to begin with? It sounds like you expect some sort of objective, definitive answer to those questions. I don't think there are any such answers. A lot of people use AOO, a bit fewer contribute to development. I can't explain the motivations of any of those people, outside of myself. I can't even explain why so many of the "old school" OO developers "sided" - so to speak - with LO, other than just the timing of the thing. But I came into AOO after a lot of the weird stuff had already happened, that created all this bitterness and resentment between the two projects. I'm a bit of an outsider as it were. So I have a hard time understanding why there even is all this acrimony and tension at all. So I don't have a lot of good answers for you. All I can say is that, for myself, I gravitated to AOO for a few reasons: 1. I prefer the Apache License 2. I was familiar with, and liked, the ASF way of doing things. 3. I started out with high hopes to leverage what seemed like a natural synergy between AOO and other ASF projects. In particular, some of the Semantic Web tech (Jena, Fuseki), and all the "big data" projects. It just felt natural to me to want to work on AOO since there was a certain amount of overlap in membership between these various projects, etc. Sadly, I got so bogged down with other activities, that I have never found time to really contribute to AOO and work on a lot of the things I had hoped to work on. I still cling to some of those ambitions, but other priorities keep getting in the way. Sorry for the long, rambling semi-answer. I'm tired and just kind of going "stream of consciousness" here.