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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 email

by 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.
owlstuffing 3y ago
> 3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just being minimally kept alive? The post is about the fact that it is _deceptively_ minimally kept alive. A significant part of the decision process involving OSS choice is measuring active maintenance. Surely, these commits exist to give a false impression here, which down the road can harm those using unmaintained software.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  How is it deceptive? Are they bumping version numbers? Are they packaging new releases? Edit: before I'm accused of not reading the article, I did, but I did not look at the actual OpenOffice download page. The current release, dated April 2023, includes the following, which seems substantially more than "whitespace cleanup" as TFA author claims, but seems quite in line with software that is being maintained but not actively developed: Other Improvements/Enhancements Writer: Dialog "Frame" in Writer / automatic size / changing shortcut keys (German) Calc: Protect Table – Dialog too narrow for German heading string Base: Dialog text in "Datenbank austauschen" (exchange database) dialog is cut (German) Calc: Use the existing icon for "Remove Filter" in toolbar and menu Calc: Text in cell comments is more readable Calc: Added support for Excel 2010s DateTime type cells. Bug Fixes Calc: Rich text cells imported from XLSX files have their contents duplicated Several fixes for importing OOXML documents All applications: Import fails when the Relationship "Target" attribute in _rels/.rels has superfluous slashes Calc: XLSX with omitted cell references opens with empty cells Calc: no text imported from XSLX when xl/sharedStrings.xml has wrong case Several fixes for importing MS Excel 2003 SpreadsheetML files Calc: ss:DateTime cell value is loaded as either only a date or a time Calc: fractional seconds are silently ignored during import Calc: cell with ss:MergeAcross="0" gets an extra empty cell to the right Calc: import corrupts references to columns that are multiples of 26 (eg. Z) Writer: Importing apostrophes from HTML fails Calc: Cut-and-paste between spreadsheets causes incorrect cell reference changes Writer: Awkward Chinese (ZH-TW) numbering suffix when importing RTF document Calc: Last CSV line is silently lost on import if last field is quoted and end-of-file is reached before closing quote
samus 3y ago
It damages both the Apache and OpenOffice brands. People who have heard of MS Office alternatives have probably OpenOffice in their mind and will attempt to use it. They will probably be dissatisfied and have a bad impression of OpenOffice, Apache, and OpenSource in general.
davidgerard 3y ago
> 3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just being minimally kept alive? The pretense that this project is alive and not a zombie puts millions of users in danger who are downloading insecure trash under the impression that this is a live project that's the OpenOffice they've heard so much about.

by sparrc 3y ago

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.

owlstuffing 3y ago

> 3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just being minimally kept alive? The post is about the fact that it is _deceptively_ minimally kept alive. A significant part of the decision process involving OSS choice is measuring active maintenance. Surely, these commits exist to give a false impression here, which down the road can harm those using unmaintained software.

SoftTalker 3y ago
How is it deceptive? Are they bumping version numbers? Are they packaging new releases? Edit: before I'm accused of not reading the article, I did, but I did not look at the actual OpenOffice download page. The current release, dated April 2023, includes the following, which seems substantially more than "whitespace cleanup" as TFA author claims, but seems quite in line with software that is being maintained but not actively developed: Other Improvements/Enhancements Writer: Dialog "Frame" in Writer / automatic size / changing shortcut keys (German) Calc: Protect Table – Dialog too narrow for German heading string Base: Dialog text in "Datenbank austauschen" (exchange database) dialog is cut (German) Calc: Use the existing icon for "Remove Filter" in toolbar and menu Calc: Text in cell comments is more readable Calc: Added support for Excel 2010s DateTime type cells. Bug Fixes Calc: Rich text cells imported from XLSX files have their contents duplicated Several fixes for importing OOXML documents All applications: Import fails when the Relationship "Target" attribute in _rels/.rels has superfluous slashes Calc: XLSX with omitted cell references opens with empty cells Calc: no text imported from XSLX when xl/sharedStrings.xml has wrong case Several fixes for importing MS Excel 2003 SpreadsheetML files Calc: ss:DateTime cell value is loaded as either only a date or a time Calc: fractional seconds are silently ignored during import Calc: cell with ss:MergeAcross="0" gets an extra empty cell to the right Calc: import corrupts references to columns that are multiples of 26 (eg. Z) Writer: Importing apostrophes from HTML fails Calc: Cut-and-paste between spreadsheets causes incorrect cell reference changes Writer: Awkward Chinese (ZH-TW) numbering suffix when importing RTF document Calc: Last CSV line is silently lost on import if last field is quoted and end-of-file is reached before closing quote

samus 3y ago

It damages both the Apache and OpenOffice brands. People who have heard of MS Office alternatives have probably OpenOffice in their mind and will attempt to use it. They will probably be dissatisfied and have a bad impression of OpenOffice, Apache, and OpenSource in general.

davidgerard 3y ago

> 3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just being minimally kept alive? The pretense that this project is alive and not a zombie puts millions of users in danger who are downloading insecure trash under the impression that this is a live project that's the OpenOffice they've heard so much about.