24 ms·

Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

315 points by tslocum 3y ago

KirillPanov 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  It appears to be true. https://github.com/apache/openoffice/activity https://github.com/apache/openoffice/activity
  - laurent123456 3y ago
    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.
    - yankput 3y ago
      It doesn’t look malicious, it seems he is randomly looking and fixing the codebase and the ASF lets him because who cares.
      - pests 3y ago
        Does the ASF let him? Do they even have the power or jurisdiction to be making these types of decisions for open office?
    - foldr 3y ago
      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/d98be9a24613ebe504de87f0f919d2f1a41bc1d6...0f46dff71a3a0e0942a743e8b5b7c556cf7fbc70 https://github.com/apache/openoffice/compare/d98be9a24613ebe...
      - alright2565 3y ago
        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-document-foundation-announces-libreoffice-4-0/ https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2013/02/07/the-docu...
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        Unless they're being paid to, the obvious answer is "this is what they felt like working on"
        foldr 3y ago
        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 3y ago
        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.
    - Allamande 3y ago
      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.
    - yifanl 3y ago
      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.
- Tactician_mark 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  My guess is possibly one of those "make a commit to an open source repo" to enter things?
- aeinbu 3y ago
  Could it be someone is hiding information in there? Could this be steganography? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
BitPirate 3y ago
Just toss it onto https://attic.apache.org/ https://attic.apache.org/, link to LibreOffice and be done with it.
Condition1952 3y ago
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.
- ye-olde-sysrq 3y ago
  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.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  Libreoffice.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    >>WYSIWYG text processor >Emacs Org-mode How is org mode WYSIWYG?
    - pests 3y ago
      I think it fits. But also so do programs like notepad. You literally get what you see. Type some text. There ya go. Its some text.
      - Condition1952 3y ago
        He he he. I meant “you compose, you set margins, you print”. WYSIWYP
berkle4455 3y ago
When you realize Apache is a hospice organization
seanhunter 3y ago
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_development.shtml https://softpanorama.org/People/Stallman/history_of_gcc_deve...
- i80and 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
      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.
garba_dlm 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Guacamole is actually still developed and getting new features, surprisingly.
zoogeny 3y ago
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 https://projects.apache.org/projects.html
- brand 3y ago
  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.
  - zoogeny 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
Twirrim 3y ago
Why on earth are we advocating for spamming the software foundation with emails about deprecating OpenOffice?
- garba_dlm 3y ago
  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?
  - ploum 3y ago
    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)
  - Twirrim 3y ago
    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.
- ndiddy 3y ago
  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/ 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 3y ago
  FWIW, the article has an invalid email address in it, so nobody's getting those messages.
jroseattle 3y ago
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/ https://www.openoffice.org/ homepage ..... Reminds me of the good old days.
- garganzol 3y ago
  But still, the site is reasonably usable even by today's standards.
  - lost_tourist 3y ago
    Some would say in spite of today's standards.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  > 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.
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    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
    - eulers_secret 3y ago
      Getting flashbacks to Gentoo building when I only had a single core. Good learning experience…
      - 3y ago
giamma 3y ago
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/Articles/443989/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130927072255/https://lwn.net/A... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20131024094250/http://www.heise.de/open/artikel/Die-Woche-Bad-Company-Oracle-1130884.html https://web.archive.org/web/20131024094250/http://www.heise....
- red_trumpet 3y ago
  Both your links go to the same article.
  - giamma 3y ago
    Thank you for pointing out, I fixed the first link.
- jonathaneunice 3y ago
  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 3y ago
dale_glass 3y ago
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?
- saurik 3y ago
  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.
  - bogwog 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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.
  - phkahler 3y ago
    >> 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.
yrro 3y ago
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.
- tombert 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    It gets millions of downloads, putting users in danger who mistakenly think anyone is still maintaining this thing.
    - tombert 3y ago
      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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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 3y ago
yankput 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    yeah that’s a good point
  - mnau 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        US cybersecurity agency is also coming up with its own version, and then the rest of the world will follow.
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
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 3y ago
  “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/ https://attic.apache.org/
  - PeterZaitsev 3y ago
    Yep. What I mean is what is the process of moving projects there ?
    - mnau 3y ago
      There is literally a link in the menu named "Process" OP posted. https://attic.apache.org/process.html https://attic.apache.org/process.html
    - samus 3y ago
      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 https://attic.apache.org
      - rbowen 3y ago
        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.
IseardMi 3y ago
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/d2a7b3cc90e953929c61184a7c57d4404200e51b https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/d2a7b3cc90e95392...
- bogwog 3y ago
  Why does someone like that have full commit access to the repo?
  - stonogo 3y ago
    Because nobody at the parent organization cares about anything but owning the brand.
- tivert 3y ago
  > 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/d2a7b3cc90e953929c61184a7c57d4404200e51b https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/d2a7b3cc90e95392... From that link: > Most of the commits here seams to be mainly white space changes to random files. It might not be "learning" but rather an attempt to game GitHub (e.g. rack up a lot of commits to important-sounding repos). My understanding is go around using automated tools to submit PRs that fix whitespace and typos in order to do that.
discussDev 3y ago
I think office 365 killed it. Microsoft added enough value to be "why not?".
- inductive_magic 3y ago
  > "why not?" > Microsoft ...
- the-smug-one 3y ago
  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.
hexagonwin 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    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 https://www.openoffice.org/security/bulletin.html For instructions on how you can report an actual security issue: https://openoffice.apache.org/security 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 3y ago
      The allegation upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37646366 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.
sparrc 3y ago
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?
- purpleidea 3y ago
  > one of the most significant OSS orgs in the world They haven't been relevant for years.
  - sparrc 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      >> 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 3y ago
        https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server 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.
purpleidea 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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?
  - Kon-Peki 3y ago
    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.
    - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
      Thanks. I follow what you're saying now.
phendrenad2 3y ago
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.
phendrenad2 3y ago
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?
talent_deprived 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
paxys 3y ago
My guess is someone is making all these pointless commits so they can put "Open Office contributor" on their resume.
ghusto 3y ago
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/ce48dd1f26396c7ab9fed48d2df6a6b2bfcf6e06 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 3y ago
  >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 3y ago
  Here[0] is that same commit with whitespace changes ignored. I only see changes to comments. [0] https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/ce48dd1f26396c7ab9fed48d2df6a6b2bfcf6e06?w=1 https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/ce48dd1f26396c7a...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
teknopaul 3y ago
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?
prataapms 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  LibreOffice is indeed trailblazing. I am not sure why a productivity suite have to be ML/AI powered tho.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    > 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 3y ago
      Free and functional = relevant. It already is these things. The LibreOffice community is huge and really strong.
      - unixhero 3y ago
        Proof: Code commits last month, https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/graphs/contributors https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/graphs/contributors Join the community, https://www.libreoffice.org/community/get-involved/ https://www.libreoffice.org/community/get-involved/ Events, https://www.libreoffice.org/events/ https://www.libreoffice.org/events/ https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Events https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Events
ezekiel68 3y ago
I got 99 problems, and outting Open Office as umaintained ain't one.
einstand 3y ago
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 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...
- Tommstein 3y ago
  Only skimmed it, but that was some sad reading.
xvilka 3y ago
If Apache was truly responsible, they would just redirect to the LibreOffice instead because AOO is dead for good for a long time already.

315 points by tslocum 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
It appears to be true. https://github.com/apache/openoffice/activity https://github.com/apache/openoffice/activity
- laurent123456 3y ago
  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.
  - yankput 3y ago
    It doesn’t look malicious, it seems he is randomly looking and fixing the codebase and the ASF lets him because who cares.
    - pests 3y ago
      Does the ASF let him? Do they even have the power or jurisdiction to be making these types of decisions for open office?
  - foldr 3y ago
    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/d98be9a24613ebe504de87f0f919d2f1a41bc1d6...0f46dff71a3a0e0942a743e8b5b7c556cf7fbc70 https://github.com/apache/openoffice/compare/d98be9a24613ebe...
    - alright2565 3y ago
      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-document-foundation-announces-libreoffice-4-0/ https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2013/02/07/the-docu...
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        Unless they're being paid to, the obvious answer is "this is what they felt like working on"
      - foldr 3y ago
        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 3y ago
        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.
  - Allamande 3y ago
    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.
  - yifanl 3y ago
    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.
Tactician_mark 3y ago
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 3y ago
My guess is possibly one of those "make a commit to an open source repo" to enter things?
aeinbu 3y ago
Could it be someone is hiding information in there? Could this be steganography? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

BitPirate 3y ago

Just toss it onto https://attic.apache.org/ https://attic.apache.org/, link to LibreOffice and be done with it.

Condition1952 3y ago

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.

ye-olde-sysrq 3y ago
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.
whalesalad 3y ago
Libreoffice.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
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 3y ago
  >>WYSIWYG text processor >Emacs Org-mode How is org mode WYSIWYG?
  - pests 3y ago
    I think it fits. But also so do programs like notepad. You literally get what you see. Type some text. There ya go. Its some text.
    - Condition1952 3y ago
      He he he. I meant “you compose, you set margins, you print”. WYSIWYP

berkle4455 3y ago

When you realize Apache is a hospice organization

seanhunter 3y ago

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_development.shtml https://softpanorama.org/People/Stallman/history_of_gcc_deve...

i80and 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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.

garba_dlm 3y ago

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 3y ago
Guacamole is actually still developed and getting new features, surprisingly.

zoogeny 3y ago

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 https://projects.apache.org/projects.html

brand 3y ago
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.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.

Twirrim 3y ago

Why on earth are we advocating for spamming the software foundation with emails about deprecating OpenOffice?

garba_dlm 3y ago
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?
- ploum 3y ago
  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)
- Twirrim 3y ago
  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.
ndiddy 3y ago
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/ 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 3y ago
FWIW, the article has an invalid email address in it, so nobody's getting those messages.

jroseattle 3y ago

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/ https://www.openoffice.org/ homepage ..... Reminds me of the good old days.

garganzol 3y ago
But still, the site is reasonably usable even by today's standards.
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  Some would say in spite of today's standards.
cratermoon 3y ago
> 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.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  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
  - eulers_secret 3y ago
    Getting flashbacks to Gentoo building when I only had a single core. Good learning experience…
    - 3y ago

giamma 3y ago

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/Articles/443989/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130927072255/https://lwn.net/A... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20131024094250/http://www.heise.de/open/artikel/Die-Woche-Bad-Company-Oracle-1130884.html https://web.archive.org/web/20131024094250/http://www.heise....

red_trumpet 3y ago
Both your links go to the same article.
- giamma 3y ago
  Thank you for pointing out, I fixed the first link.
jonathaneunice 3y ago
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 3y ago

dale_glass 3y ago

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?

saurik 3y ago
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.
- bogwog 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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.
- phkahler 3y ago
  >> 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.

yrro 3y ago

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.

tombert 3y ago
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 3y ago
  It gets millions of downloads, putting users in danger who mistakenly think anyone is still maintaining this thing.
  - tombert 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago

yankput 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  yeah that’s a good point
- mnau 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      US cybersecurity agency is also coming up with its own version, and then the rest of the world will follow.

PeterZaitsev 3y ago

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 3y ago
“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/ https://attic.apache.org/
- PeterZaitsev 3y ago
  Yep. What I mean is what is the process of moving projects there ?
  - mnau 3y ago
    There is literally a link in the menu named "Process" OP posted. https://attic.apache.org/process.html https://attic.apache.org/process.html
  - samus 3y ago
    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 https://attic.apache.org
    - rbowen 3y ago
      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.

IseardMi 3y ago

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/d2a7b3cc90e953929c61184a7c57d4404200e51b https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/d2a7b3cc90e95392...

bogwog 3y ago
Why does someone like that have full commit access to the repo?
- stonogo 3y ago
  Because nobody at the parent organization cares about anything but owning the brand.
tivert 3y ago
> 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/d2a7b3cc90e953929c61184a7c57d4404200e51b https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/d2a7b3cc90e95392... From that link: > Most of the commits here seams to be mainly white space changes to random files. It might not be "learning" but rather an attempt to game GitHub (e.g. rack up a lot of commits to important-sounding repos). My understanding is go around using automated tools to submit PRs that fix whitespace and typos in order to do that.

discussDev 3y ago

I think office 365 killed it. Microsoft added enough value to be "why not?".

inductive_magic 3y ago
> "why not?" > Microsoft ...
the-smug-one 3y ago
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.

hexagonwin 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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 https://www.openoffice.org/security/bulletin.html For instructions on how you can report an actual security issue: https://openoffice.apache.org/security 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 3y ago
    The allegation upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37646366 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.

sparrc 3y ago

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?

purpleidea 3y ago
> one of the most significant OSS orgs in the world They haven't been relevant for years.
- sparrc 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    >> 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 3y ago
      https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server 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.

purpleidea 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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?
- Kon-Peki 3y ago
  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.
  - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
    Thanks. I follow what you're saying now.

phendrenad2 3y ago

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.

phendrenad2 3y ago

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?

talent_deprived 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.

paxys 3y ago

My guess is someone is making all these pointless commits so they can put "Open Office contributor" on their resume.

ghusto 3y ago

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/ce48dd1f26396c7ab9fed48d2df6a6b2bfcf6e06 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 3y ago
>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 3y ago
Here[0] is that same commit with whitespace changes ignored. I only see changes to comments. [0] https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/ce48dd1f26396c7ab9fed48d2df6a6b2bfcf6e06?w=1 https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/ce48dd1f26396c7a...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

teknopaul 3y ago

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?

prataapms 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago
LibreOffice is indeed trailblazing. I am not sure why a productivity suite have to be ML/AI powered tho.
- nologic01 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    Free and functional = relevant. It already is these things. The LibreOffice community is huge and really strong.
    - unixhero 3y ago
      Proof: Code commits last month, https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/graphs/contributors https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/graphs/contributors Join the community, https://www.libreoffice.org/community/get-involved/ https://www.libreoffice.org/community/get-involved/ Events, https://www.libreoffice.org/events/ https://www.libreoffice.org/events/ https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Events https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Events

ezekiel68 3y ago

I got 99 problems, and outting Open Office as umaintained ain't one.

einstand 3y ago

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 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...

Tommstein 3y ago
Only skimmed it, but that was some sad reading.

xvilka 3y ago

If Apache was truly responsible, they would just redirect to the LibreOffice instead because AOO is dead for good for a long time already.