Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
In the case of Apache OpenOffice, needing to disclose security vulnerabilities for which there is no mitigation in an update has become a serious issue. In responses to concerns raised in June, the PMC is currently tasked by the ASF Board to account for this inability and to provide a remedy. An indicator of the seriousness of the Board's concern is the PMC been requested to report to the Board every month, starting in August, rather than quarterly, the normal case. One option for remedy that must be considered is retirement of the project. The request is for the PMC's consideration among other possible options." (Thanks to James Hogarth.)
Also of interest is this note on how the handling of CVE-2016-1513 went.
| From: | "Dennis E. Hamilton" <orcmid-AT-apache.org> | |
| To: | <dev-AT-openoffice.apache.org> | |
| Subject: | [DISCUSS] What Would OpenOffice Retirement Involve? (long) | |
| Date: | Thu, 1 Sep 2016 16:37:00 -0700 | |
| Message-ID: | <008d01d204a9$bd37caa0$37a75fe0$@apache.org> |
Here is what a careful retirement of Apache OpenOffice could look like.
A. PERSPECTIVE
B. WHAT RETIREMENT COULD LOOK LIKE
1. Code Base
2. Downloads
3. Development Support
4. Public-Project Community Interfaces
5. Social Media Presence
6. Project Management Committee
7. Branding
A. PERSPECTIVE
I have regularly observed that the Apache OpenOffice project has limited
capacity for sustaining the project in an energetic manner. It is also my
considered opinion that there is no ready supply of developers who have the
capacity, capability, and will to supplement the roughly half-dozen
volunteers holding the project together. It doesn't matter what the reasons
for that might be.
The Apache Project Maturity Model,
<http://community.apache.org/apache-way/apache-project-mat...>,
identifies the characteristics for which an Apache project is expected to
strive.
Recently, some elements have been brought into serious question:
QU20: The project puts a very high priority on producing secure software.
QU50: The project strives to respond to documented bug reports in a timely
manner.
There is also a litmus test which is kind of a red line. That is for the
project to have a PMC capable of producing releases. That means that there
are at least three available PMC members capable of building a functioning
binary from a release-candidate archive, and who do so in providing binding
votes to approve the release of that code.
In the case of Apache OpenOffice, needing to disclose security
vulnerabilities for which there is no mitigation in an update has become a
serious issue.
In responses to concerns raised in June, the PMC is currently tasked by the
ASF Board to account for this inability and to provide a remedy. An
indicator of the seriousness of the Board's concern is the PMC been requested
to report to the Board every month, starting in August, rather than
quarterly, the normal case. One option for remedy that must be considered is
retirement of the project. The request is for the PMC's consideration among
other possible options. The Board has not ordered a solution.
I cannot prediction how this will all work out. It is remiss of me not to
point out that retirement of the project is a serious possibility.
There are those who fear that discussing retirement can become a
self-fulfilling prophecy. My concern is that the project could end with a
bang or a whimper. My interest is in seeing any retirement happen
gracefully. That means we need to consider it as a contingency. For
contingency plans, no time is a good time, but earlier is always better than
later.
B. WHAT RETIREMENT COULD LOOK LIKE
Here is a provisional list of all elements that would have to be addressed,
over a period of time, as part of any retirement effort.
In order to understand what would have had to happen in a graceful process,
the assumption below is that the project has already retired.
Requests for additions and adjustments to this compilation are welcome.
1. CODE BASE
1.1 The Apache OpenOffice Subversion repository where code is maintained
has been moved to "The Attic." Apache Attic is an actual project,
<http://attic.apache.org/>. The source code would remain
available and could be checked-out from Subversion by anyone interested in
making use of it. There is no means of committing changes.
1.2 Apache Externals/Extras consists of external libraries that are
relied upon by the source code but are not part of the source code. These
were housed on SourceForge and elsewhere. (a) They might have been archived
in conjunction with the SVN (1.1). (b) They might be identified in a way
that someone attempting to build from source later on would be able to work
with later versions of the external dependencies. There are additional
external dependencies that might have become obsolete.
1.3 Build Dependencies/Tool Chains. The actual construction of the
released binaries depends on particular versions of specific tools that are
used for carrying out builds of binaries from the source. The dependencies
as they last were used are identified in a historical location. Some of the
tools and their use become obsolete over time.
1.4 GitHub Mirror. For the GitHub Mirror of the Apache OpenOffice SVN
(a) pull requests are not accepted. (b) Continuation of the presence of the
GitHub repository might be shut down at some point depending on GitHub policy
and ASF support.
2. DOWNLOADS
2.1 The source code releases, patches, and installable binaries are all
retained in the archive system that is already maintained. There are no
further additions.
2.2 The downloading of full releases is supported on the SourceForge
mirroring system. There are no new downloads. How long until SourceForge
retires its support for downloads is not predictable (and see 4.3).
2.3 The Apache OpenOffice Extensions and Templates system is an
independent arrangement hosted and curated on SourceForge. Whether and how
long the download service is preserved by SourceForge is not predictable.
2.4 The mechanism for announcing updates to installed versions of
OpenOffice binaries is adjusted to indicate that (a) particular versions are
no longer supported. (b) For the latest distribution(s), there may be advice
to users about investigating still-supported alternatives.
3. DEVELOPMENT SUPPORT
3.1 The Apache OpenOffice Bugzilla is mirrored in The Attic. The
Bugzilla is read-only and preserved for historical purposes.
3.2 The Pootle materials used for the development of localizations are
exported and archived.
3.3 The Confluence Wiki operated by the project is preserved in a
read-only state:<https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/>.
3.4 The commits@ and issues@ mailing lists are shut down although
archived.
4. PUBLIC PROJECT-COMMUNITY INTERFACES
4.1 All public discussion mailing lists are shut down. They are all
archived and accessible from The Attic.
4.2 The dev@ list was the last to shut down, having been used during
orchestration of the retirement.
4.3 The http://openoffice.org site is static and uneditable. The CMS
functions for contribution to the site are disabled. Over the course of
retirement, key pages of the site were updated to reflect the retirement
activity and to eventually end some of the functions, such as information on
how to contribute, how to obtain the software, how to obtain help, branding
requirements, etc.
4.4 The Wikimedia subsite of openoffice.org is read-only and static. No
contributions or edits can be made. At some point, the Wikimedia server will
need to be shut down and (a) the server is shutdown/moved with openoffice.org
indicating that the wiki is unavailable. (b) Only a static form of the pages
is provided. (c) Alternative hosting and rebranding is achieved.
4.5 The OpenOffice Community Forums were semi-autonomous. (a) The server
is retired. (b) The site is rehosted and rebranded by agreement with the
Apache OpenOffice project and the ASF.
5. SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE
5.1 The Apache Planet OpenOffice Blog is terminated with the announcement
that Retirement is complete.
5.2 The Twitter account is terminated.
5.3 Any Facebook page under control of the project is closed.
5.4 The announce@ list is terminated and archived with the announcement
of Retirement completion.
6. PROJECT MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE
6.1 With completion of the retirement, the private@ and security@
openoffice.org lists were shutdown (although archived as are all such
lists).
6.2 The Project Management Committee is disbanded and the Chair is
relieved.
6.3 There is no longer any identified operation for continuation of the
project except as specified for The Attic.
7. BRANDING
7.1 With the cessation of releases, it is made widely known that official
releases other than the last ones provided by the project are not the work of
Apache OpenOffice and any claimed association, justification for charge of
fees and for carrying of advertising are not in support of the Apache
OpenOffice project. This notification will also be made to those
organizations that carry offerings to the contrary (e.g., eBay).
7.2 There is no point of contact, other than branding@ apache.org, for
request to make use of the brands.
7.3 There is no active attention to preservation of the trademarks
related to Apache OpenOffice. (a) Inappropriate use of Apache and its
symbols in names of offerings will be defended when brought to the attention
of branding@. (b) Uses of OpenOffice, Open Office, openoffice.org and other
similarities without attribution to Apache are not addressed.
*** end of the list as of 2016-09-01 ***
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Contemplating the retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 7:19 UTC (Fri) by pivot (guest, #588) [Link]
Contemplating the retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 7:41 UTC (Fri) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link]
Contemplating the retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 8:58 UTC (Fri) by tcabot (subscriber, #6656) [Link]
Contemplating the retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 20:47 UTC (Sun) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
One solution might be if Apache keeps the trademark (if they are willing), with the openoffice.org website pointing to OpenOffice.org/StarOffice-derived office suites (or other projects that are based on its code).
Contemplating the retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 21:50 UTC (Sun) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
forwarding link
Posted Sep 2, 2016 7:40 UTC (Fri) by sbishop (guest, #33061) [Link]
Contemplating the retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 7:40 UTC (Fri) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]
It will be nice for Apache to redirect to LibreOffice website. Frankly, Apache OpenOffice was already a walking dead project and much effort went to waste
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 8:23 UTC (Fri) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link]
How hard would it be with Apache's resources to spin up a consistent build for Windows and Mac OS on a compile farms? Then they could have just patched, compiled, tested MONTHS AND MONTHS earlier, and put out a point release quite quickly.
When your project can't even be compiled in under a year, you have serious issues that aren't going to be fixed by good intentions.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 9:28 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
This is quite easy to understand, and due to OO.o and AOO corporate nature.
It is quite hard for a corporate PHB to understand technical issues, and ever harder for them to sell them to upper management. Therefore corporate software always emphasises long feature lists, and visible UI gimmicks (sidebar, ribbon) over responsiveness, security updates, build processes, effective standard compliance, and other kinds of effectiveness or plumbing. "Real" (read expensive) employees are focused on new "visible" features, an increasing army of low-cost interns is used to compensate the slow rot of infrastructure and other build processes.
You should never buy small-fish innovative software after a few years of Oracle, IBM, etc ownership. It will invariably have degenerated in a feature-packed slow-as-a-snail clusterfuck that requires expensive consultants to deploy and never quite manages to hit the promised target.
Indeed the IBM person that lead AOO in its first years devoted quite a lot of time to disparage the efforts LO spent on sanitizing its codebase (build system included), that couldn't possibly compare to IBM's earth-shattering contribution of a sidebar to the project.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 11:14 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
You should never buy small-fish innovative software after a few years of Oracle, IBM, etc ownership. It will invariably have degenerated in a feature-packed slow-as-a-snail clusterfuck that requires expensive consultants to deploy and never quite manages to hit the promised target.I think this is unfair. What's happening here isn't some sort of Large Corporation Evil scattered over a project by virtue of its ownership. What's happening here is more in the nature of different sorts of management. In my case, I've seen a project with only a few dozen staff in a fairly small company utterly drowned in box-ticking featuritis of the sort you mentioned; I've also seen projects fly along under corporate ownership (the team was small but the company employed fifty thousand people).
The key, I think, is the nature of the management chain and more generally the number of people who choose to put their oar in on changes. If that is small and the chain is shallow, even a really big company can do stuff very fast, almost like a startup. If the thing is stakeholders up the wazoo, most of whom necessarily don't actually understand the project or are making project decisions for unrelated reasons, you have sclerosis. It's just that big companies are more prone to have long management chains and horrible politics than small ones -- but, again, that is not necessarily the case, and small parts of large companies can retain the go-getting dammit-full-speed-ahead spirit, often by explicit upper-management fiat or simply because nobody else in the company really cares much about what they're doing or knows they're there.
But Apache... Apache's processes are more or less designed to get input from everyone come what may, and thus produce sclerosis. Letting everyone have input seems like a really praiseworthy thing, but it has a cost, and given enough of it the project becomes immobile. (My uncle worked for an insurer once on a business-critical project where, because it was so critical, every change, even changes with no functional effect, had to be signed off by committees numbering 40+ people. Unsurprisingly the project was more or less frozen in aspic. Forget development: even trivial maintenance to fix terrible problems became impossible.)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 11:40 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
And big corporations can be quite affective and agile on some projects (but that's the exception not the rule and usually only happens on projects linked to the company core competency).
However big generalistic software behemots like IBM and Oracle combine size with diversification, they do not have a clearly defined corporate focus (except database so Oracle). That's a lethal combination for any third-party software they become the owner of.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 12:27 UTC (Fri) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 13:44 UTC (Fri) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 14:14 UTC (Fri) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
In any case, the idea behind AOO was to create a permissively licensed OO implementation that could be used and consumed by everyone; a common, shared core that people could contribute back to, in true FOSS fashion (especially for people who like weak-copyleft) and allowing them to focus on their own implementations, w/o bothering with, or worrying about, the common bits.
Now, as we know, that was the goal: having a central place where the common bits could be shared and worked on, while allowing for alternative end-user implementations to grow and thrive, as they focus on their specific end-user audience. What happened is that, due to bad blood based on how people were treated by Oracle, the misconception that Apache "stole" OO from TDF, and self-serving trolls who personally benefited from creating division between the communities, this sharing never happened. In particular, despite being pro weak-copyleft, LO refused to do willingly what they force others to do: give back their improvements and patches to the "upstream" code. As such, instead of being a shared resource, AOO was forced into going it alone, which, of course, created further division.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 14:31 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]
You leave out that "upstream" AOO was licensed differently to LO, making "giving back" considerably more problematic due to license incompatibilities.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 19:40 UTC (Fri) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link]
Gerv
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 21:39 UTC (Fri) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
Permissive licensed code is always universal donor.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 22:45 UTC (Fri) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]
Noel Grandin noted on Hacker News that he tried to contribute to AOO, but ... there aren't people at AOO to handle the incoming patches.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 23:58 UTC (Fri) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
FOR THE RECORD: I am NOT saying that Noel Grandin is saying this or doing this!
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 19:00 UTC (Sat) by dtardon (subscriber, #53317) [Link]
So suddenly it's not enough if a LibreOffice developer provides his patches under ASL, but he's also required to bring them to AOO on a silver plate?
Btw, LibreOffice developers have been in the same situation re AOO commits. And they have coped with it.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 22:45 UTC (Sat) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 0:07 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Add to that, LO is a renamed Go-OO, which was MPL-licenced from the beginning. So there was never a question of "LO chose a licence that was incompatible with AOO" - the fact is LO was there *long* before, and it was AOO that chose the incompatible licence ... (although, being Apache, it wasn't the Apache foundation's choice - the fact remains however that it was the people behind OO who chose to be incompatible ...)
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 2:24 UTC (Sat) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 10:08 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Apache had the advantage (a massive advantage) of actually OWNING THE COPYRIGHT in OO. *THAT* is the point you seem wilfully blind to. LO and the TDF *COULD* *NOT* relicence Go-OO/LO without a massive administrative headache that any number of developers could simply have refused to participate in, and block the process.
Simply put, Apache could re-licence OO by managerial fiat. TDF had no hope in hell of relicencing Go-OO/LO without a *massive* administrative headache, and with no guarantee of success.
(The only reason the relicencing of LO from LGPL to MPL was able to succeed, was because once AOO relicenced OO to Apache, it was just a matter of an audit to make sure all the code really was either OO and compatible with the MPL, or LO and licenced under the MPL. A completely different kettle of fish from trying to get loads of developers, quite a few of which are probably dead :-(, to agree to change their licence.)
Yes, they could have asked for all NEW contributions to be licenced Apache2, but that would still have given the AOO people a massive headache because every cherry-pick into AOO would have been needed to be checked for Apache compatibility. And I think by that time there was too much bad blood :-(
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 13:30 UTC (Sat) by dtardon (subscriber, #53317) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 14:18 UTC (Sat) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
At that point, if they had any desire to contribute back to AOO, they would have had the opportunity to ask that developers allow their *patches* and code to be triple licensed. As noted on the above page, their firm resistance to permissive licensing did not allow for that, although they took full advantage of that permissive license to do what they wanted. Again, the ALv2 does not force contributions back, but the hope and intent is that people who consume ALv2 code will be altruistic enough to do so. We see that in the case of LO, this did not happen.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 19:14 UTC (Sat) by dtardon (subscriber, #53317) [Link]
Sorry, but who's "they"? TDF? AFAIK TDF has never prohibited contributing to AOO. And IMHO it's task of AOO, not TDF, to propagate AOO among developers...
> As noted on the above page, their firm resistance to permissive licensing did not allow for that, although they took full advantage of that permissive license to do what they wanted.
The work to bring usable AOO commits to LibreOffice--and it has not been an easy work, despite what you hint at--has been done by individual developers, not by some amorphous "they".
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 20:09 UTC (Sat) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link]
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?h=aoo/...
almost all commits have a git-annotation...
YTD for 2016 there is 166 commits on the aoo/trunck branch. 7 of them made it to lo -- 4 of them by Damjan Jovanovic who did commit some interesting and useful fixes (thanks) -- with an annotation of 'merged as: <sha>' the sha being the sha of that equivalent commit in master
the rest is either marked as
prefer: <sha> which indicate that the said patch has already been addressed previously in master (although not necessarily the same way, and sometimes years before, including before the AOO fork started)
or
ignore: <various reason>
the most common reason being that the patch is aoo-specific, like changing version number and other house keeping
or that the patch is obsolete (like patching the ancient and long replaced dmake build system)
To put it in perspective: YTD for 2016 there has been 10516 commit on master.. so 7/10516 = 0.066%, so much for the 'upstream' myth.
it is a bit like going to New Orleans, peeing in the river and declaring yourself 'upstream' of the Mississippi
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 3:21 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 20:33 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
> Sorry, but who's "they"? TDF? AFAIK TDF has never prohibited contributing to AOO. And IMHO it's task of AOO, not TDF, to propagate AOO among developers...
JIm's point - a very valid one imho - is that the board of TDF could have asked LO contributors to triple-licence - Apache/MPL/LGPL.
The problem is, Jim seems to be (like all the "best" generals) wilfully ignorant of the realities on the ground. Many LO devs were upset with Sun/Oracle because of their imperviousness to contributions. Many LO devs were upset because they felt that giving OO to the Apache foundation was a kick in the teeth for them for all the work they'd done on Go-OO. And then we have the general trolling of LO by people at Apache.
And if you read this, Jim, you need to stop being evasive, and start taking personal responsibility instead of coming over as a corporate PR spokesdroid. Back in this article, you were asked a DIRECT question about what YOU thought. So, in reply, you pointed to a mail server and said "you'll find the answer there". Leaving the reader to search for a needle in a haystack! Most people here have a very poor opinion of Apache and AOO. You're not helping. You come over as a nice guy pushing the corporate line. Not likely to make you many friends here.
And I am quite happy to say that, in my own experience, all the trolling was pretty much one way certainly on LWN. The LO guys mostly ignored AOO, the AOO "spokes-troll" delighted in making a nuisance of himself.
Plus, the AOO devs have done nothing to actively help LO. Even if the LO devs were willing to triple-licence (and I expect a lot of them aren't, now), it would be up to the AOO devs to cherry-pick from the LO code base. So they'd have to check that the contributor had triple-licenced. They would have to have checked that the commit didn't depend on a Go-OO commit. They would have had to have checked that the commit didn't depend on a dev who had refused to relicence ...
If AOO had opened by asking the LO people to triple licence, and had asked the LO people to help with the grunt work of converting OOO into AOO, and hadn't invested so much effort in actively infuriating the LO devs, then things might have got along much better.
The problem is, AOO started with a codebase that was laden with technical debt, and they actively harassed a project that had invested a lot of effort into getting rid of that debt from the same original codebase. If they'd asked the LO people to help out to mutual benefit, they would probably have had a friendly reception. Instead, they asked the LO people to throw away all the hard work they'd done cleaning up the codebase, and to start the SAME work again from scratch. And when the LO guys (unsurprisingly) refused, they got all upset and obnoxious.
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 21:29 UTC (Sat) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]
Thing is that if I am a proponent of (weak) copyleft licensing, I will *not* triple license under the Apache - a permissive - license which effectively nullifies my copyleft provisions. In this case we could simply ditch the rest and just use the Apache license in the first place.
So, a contributor valueing copyleft principles would of course lose out in the proposed scheme. So it's nothing personal against AOO and conspiracy theories and misguided. As LO contributors often explicitely value copyleft, I believe this is one of the reasons why so little ends up Apache-licensed. I know it is the case for me.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 22:26 UTC (Sat) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
The question you refer to appears to be "Please explain your view of how AOO ended up here." Since "here" is clear, I will address here as in "why OO ended up at Apache" as well as here as in "this state".
1. Why at Apache.
Again, the full discussions on whether or not to accept OO into Apache are open and public. All this happened in June of 2011. There were hundreds of posts about it, which can be read at https://lists.apache.org/list.html?general@incubator.apac... .
Esp look at:
o https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/c2d942f99e00e6ca97a8...
o https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/fbd76edce2746a7263f6...
o https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/7ae4d9224b6a4e3fa249...
o https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/e3e63d8d1a6e4c08ab1c...
So, in general, the reason why OO ended up at Apache is that there was a need (and still is, BTW) for a permissively licensed office suite that could serve as a core, commonly shared Office implementation that could be used, leveraged and consumed by the entire OO eco-system. Instead of people creating their own one-off, AOO could serve as a base core that people could build upon. As such, it could serve as a central sharing place for code, again to benefit the entire OO community. If the desire was to create as many FOSS alternatives for MSO, then having such a permissively licensed base was key. Even the FSF admits that if wide adoption and free/open standards are important, more permissively licensed implementations are better (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.en.html). Finally, it was hoped that Apache could help "heal the wounds" as it were between the OO and LO communities.
No let's be clear: Oracle was not going to donate OO to TDF/LO, for a number of reasons. One of which is that TDF didn't legally exist at the time. Another is that Oracle wanted to have the OO codebase under a permissive license. As far as I know there were talks between Oracle and TDF, but to no avail. Knowing that it is pretty clear that if Apache had not accepted OO, Oracle would likely have simply shuttered it or sold it to IBM, neither of which benefits the OO community.
Which brings us to...
2. Why at this state.
As was mentioned, it was hoped that, as such, there would be great cooperation between TDF and AOO. That did not happen. There was way too much bad blood between LO/TDF and Oracle which got transferred over to Apache. FUD was spread about secret deals between IBM, Oracle and Apache, to discourage potential developers from hacking AOO and instead going to LO. The license-wars (copyleft vs. permissive) were played to great glory portraying AOO as enemies of FOSS and LO being loyal to the cause. This caused a handful of AOO developers and aficionados to go just-as-postal and start trolling LO in return. Various people with money in the game fanned the flames to ensure their "investments" on both sides paid out.
All in all, the good will, the spirit and hope of co-operation and coop-itition never happened.
Finally, some big committers to AOO got frustrated that they were contributing useful stuff to AOO which then got pretty immediately consumed by LO, when, at the same time, there was resistance (ranging from minor to extensive) from stuff going the other way. Feeling that TDF wasn't "playing fair" these committers stopped, leaving a vacuum in AOO.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 23:22 UTC (Sat) by DOT (guest, #58786) [Link]
Whatever comes next, I hope OpenOffice users won't be left with unsupported software that won't ever be upgraded anymore (maybe release an upgrade from AOO to LO?). I also hope the OpenOffice trademark won't be allowed to lapse, as that would make it very difficult to combat malware-infected OpenOffice fakes.
How AOO ended up here
Posted Sep 4, 2016 8:41 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
So there's the seed of your problem right away. These "big committers" were actively hostile to the Apache project's choice of licensing. They actually wanted share-alike rules, and Apache is strictly opposed to that. Counting them as an asset was a grave error _by Apache_
Right there in the threads you linked is already the terrible sign that large numbers of people who actually _care_ about this stuff are giving a -1 against Apache's plan with long reasoned thinking and almost all citing the fact that TDF is the right home for this software. I don't know, maybe it's normal at Apache for all potential incubations to see such levels of disagreement ? Seems very unhealthy to me.
The other thing one or two people bring up that you've largely shaded out is that most incubations are for projects whose community comes to Apache and says we want to join. That community might be small and literally every member wants incubation, or it might be large and have come to this decision by some vote or other method. But what was rare (unprecedented ?) was for a new project to be "donated" as OpenOffice.org was, as a baby left on a doorstep. "Good luck, bye".
How AOO ended up here
Posted Sep 4, 2016 12:26 UTC (Sun) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
>These "big committers" were actively hostile to the Apache project's choice of licensing. They actually wanted share-alike rules, and Apache is strictly opposed to that.
Nope, these big committers were people actively open and pro permissive licensing. As I said, they felt that their contributions were being abused by LO for the sole and singular purpose of defeating AOO.
>But what was rare (unprecedented ?) was for a new project to be "donated" as OpenOffice.org was
Not at all.
>"Good luck, bye"
That is one of the goals of incubation and creating a new project. To help it build a community where one didn't exist before.
>that large numbers of people who actually _care_ about this stuff are giving a -1 against Apache's plan
You ignore all those posts of people on both sides who saw this as an opportunity as well.
In any case, it certainly shows that all those people who say that Apache was clueless about the job it faced are completely wrong. There was resistance and disagreement for sure; there was also opportunity and potential as well. In the end the optimistic side won out. And as I mentioned before, LO benefited greatly from AOO, not least of which was its ability to rebase on a ALv2 AOO codebase and to inherit the IP provenance (and whatever IP related to patents, etc) that resulted from Oracle's donation.
How AOO ended up here
Posted Sep 4, 2016 17:46 UTC (Sun) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]
How AOO ended up here
Posted Sep 6, 2016 12:09 UTC (Tue) by roblucid (guest, #48964) [Link]
How AOO ended up here
Posted Sep 4, 2016 19:33 UTC (Sun) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
> Nope, these big committers were people actively open and pro permissive licensing. As I said, they felt that their contributions were being abused by LO for the sole and singular purpose of defeating AOO.
Projection much?
How AOO ended up here
Posted Sep 4, 2016 19:58 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
How AOO ended up here
Posted Sep 5, 2016 9:03 UTC (Mon) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]
> Nope, these big committers were people actively open and pro permissive licensing. As I said, they felt that their contributions were being abused by LO for the sole and singular purpose of defeating AOO.
So they wanted permissive licensing (which means embracing the possibility of giving without receiving) but didn't want LO to avail of that. I can resolve this conundrum in only two ways: 1) they had a naive idea of what permissive vs share-alike means 2) they specifically didn't want LO to be counted as part of the "wider OO community" despite the fact that it already was the largest subgroup of that community. Neither option shines a very good light on these big AOO contributors.
LO didn't "abuse" the AOO license, they used it as designed. If AOO's intent was for people to share-alike, then they should have chosen a share-alike license. The AOO community could have encouraged LO devs to triple-license their patches (which would have enabled AOO to cherry-pick the same way that LO did), but it seems that they just grumbled non-constructively instead. Conversely, the LO community attempted to mend the community by creating TDF and inviting people in, but that (unsurprisingly) did not work out.
Lastly, you complain about some LO devs wanting to defeat AOO. Ignoring the tit-for-tat reactions, it's completely normal that most of the LO community wanted nothing to do with AOO : LO contributors are pragmatic people who wanted to get the job done, and a huge part of that was getting rid of the Sun/Oracle bureaucracy, which Apache barely improved upon. The frustratingly long time for AOO to get set up and do their first "no-op" release was another sign that Apache was not a good home for the OO IP.
Really, AOO's lack of success was a surprise to nobody outside the AOO community. Pretty much everybody outside of AOO has been waiting (patiently or aggressively) for AOO to die off since its inception (no hindsight needed). Five years on, we're still hoping.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 15:09 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
> which is that TDF didn't legally exist at the time.
That's pretty disingenuous, TDF creation (should I say incubation?) was a long time in the making. It didn't sprang suddenly fully formed, pretty much all its core constituents were known beforehand.
It would have been trivial to just poll anyone with an OO.o account, GOO.o commit or OO.o distro maintainership rôle to learn how the land lay. (And Oracle/IBM knew perfectly well that sacking existing SUN OO.o devs was hardly a good start for a new project).
Indeed the OpenJDF history shows SUN and Oracle were perfectly able to feel the water and embrace existing developer communities when they wanted to.
The truth is that TDF was pondered many time during SUN last OO.o years, it crystallized when SUN was sold and SUN/Oracle and IBM were perfectly aware of its future existence.
And then it would have been utterly trivial to wait for the end of the TDF paperwork or even speed it up a little with some corporate help.
No, the real reason is
> Oracle [IBM] wanted to have the OO codebase under a permissive license.
And there was no way *that* was going to happen outside a corp-only project. SUN had just about convinced every third party they needed some form of copyleft to protect themselves from corp diktats, and Oracle had a worse reputation than SUN. Again, any due diligence in polling existing contributors would have shown that.
Creating a competing project to TDF at this stage was a trainwreck in the making. The Apache could only ignore it by turning a blind eye to inconvenient facts. It proceeded nevertheless, either for foolish idealistic reasons, or because some Apache members wanted an OpenJDK/Apache Harmony revenge.
Problem is, in both cases the IBM sugar daddy defaulted.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 21:53 UTC (Mon) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 18:24 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
> Finally, some big committers to AOO got frustrated that they were contributing useful stuff to AOO which then got pretty immediately consumed by LO, when, at the same time, there was resistance (ranging from minor to extensive) from stuff going the other way. Feeling that TDF wasn't "playing fair" these committers stopped, leaving a vacuum in AOO.
And oh my, how this does show the importance of perception over reality!
Not that I understand the figures someone else quoted - is it just 7 AOO commits found their way into LO out of 150, or was it 2000, commits, or are those figures just for 2016 (in which case I must say I think they are very misleading ...), but it comes over pretty clearly that far fewer commits went from AOO to LO than people think.
Are the AOO devs looking at the "LO reviewed these AOO patches" figures and assuming they were all cherry-picked?
And at the end of the day, there is (on the LibreOffice side at least) ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping the AOO devs from cherrypicking LO code into AOO. The EXISTING LO licence permits it. The only thing stopping AOO cherrypicking LO code is idealism on the part of AOO.
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 20:36 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
It is true, perhaps, that the final calculation should have been 10,000-odd versus 150 commits, rather than versus the 7 that were also relevant to LO -- i.e. LibreOffice is *only* perhaps a hundred times more active than AOO at this point. Obviously that makes AOO a worthy upstream after all!
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 20:48 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
It's always been considered obvious that as time goes by, the amount of cherry-picking from AOO into LO will go down as the code bases diverge ...
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 10:22 UTC (Tue) by Felix (subscriber, #36445) [Link]
Well OpenHub's code crawlers seem to experience some problems with analyzing the latest AOO code but anyway: I guess their graphs give a basic overview https://www.openhub.net/p/openoffice/commits/summary vs. https://www.openhub.net/p/libreoffice/commits/summary (restrict LibreOffice graphs to last 5 years to exclude the big spikes earlier).
As one can see there is not a single month in the latest 5 years where LibreOffice had less than 1000 commits (sometimes even 2-3k commits per month). In (roughly) the same time frame AOO saw only 4 *months* where it had more than 500 commits and basically since the fall of 2014 the commit frequency went downhill.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 12:07 UTC (Tue) by roblucid (guest, #48964) [Link]
You're kidding yourself if you think permissive licensing is about code-sharing, it suits companies who want to add their own secret "sauce" and create fragmented closed features.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 19:27 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]
Of course, as with any copylefted work, the AOO devs were welcome to approach individual developers and ask for permission to use their code in AOO. No matter how LO was licensed as a whole, the individual authors could relicense their code if they wanted. And I'm sure some would have said yes, especially if they didn't have to do the (by this time non-trivial) porting work themselves.
But of course, AOO, for a variety of reasons, lacked the manpower for any such effort. And had at least one very prominent member stirring up bad blood between the projects, making it less likely that individual developers would be interested in helping "his" project.
Really, AOO might have ended up in a much different place if they'd simply muzzled that guy early on!
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 19:53 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Further, clearly many people (given your "uni-directional" comment) *prefer* to *NOT* have to rely on altruism. Clearly, many people who believe in code being "given back" think the _most sensible_ way to achieve that is just to require it in the licence.
It is mystifying how supporters of permissive licences can simultaneously:
- Believe code must be available under a permissive licence, so (e.g., I guess) it can be used in proprietary code
- Get upset when other free software projects incorporate said code into copyleft projects.
Really, if you want people to follow certain rules or behave in certain ways with your code , just state those rules in the licence. And (unless people are exploiting some unintended loophole), don't get upset when people follow your licence - that's just illogical when _you set those rules_.
"They should have followed my beliefs, not my explicit licence!" is the weirdest kind of passive-aggressiveness in software.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 21:47 UTC (Sun) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 22:43 UTC (Sun) by DOT (guest, #58786) [Link]
There is one role a proprietary project cannot fulfill: being a common base that everybody builds on, a place of open collaboration. Therefore, a proprietary product is never in direct competition with a permissively licensed project. But a (weak) copyleft project forked from the permissive project can take over this role. Moreover, the copyleft project then has an "unfair" advantage, in that it can take code from the permissive codebase while no code flows back[1]. The copyleft project then quickly looks like a more attractive place for collaboration.
So why go permissive, then, in the first place? Well, in theory there are some advantages over copyleft for businesses that want to create proprietary products. So if you have a strong community of businesses adding value on top of your project, a permissive license is a good fit. But these advantages mostly vanish in the case of LO vs AOO, because the MPL is just weak enough for most businesses. It also didn't help that there wasn't a strong proprietary community to fuel AOO development. If Oracle and IBM had thrived with their AOO derivatives, the outcome would have been very different.
[1] It is important to remember that there is nothing legally stopping Apache from taking LibreOffice's code and incorporating it with AOO. MPL and ASL are completely compatible. The problem is simply that Apache is not willing to take code with that license.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 6:24 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Pretty simple really. Either they agree with their own licence and they should be happy when it's used in copyleft projects as much as proprietary, closed ones; OR they should use a licence that actually reflects what they want.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 14:31 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
What you're describing is the default state of copyright - ALL the code in LO that is taken from AOO is still Apache - afaik the Apache licence doesn't allow you to relicence, it just allows you to commingle and distribute.
What I think you mean is a licence that is a "universal receiver" like the GPL - "if you mix Apache-AB with something else, the entire work must be distributable as Apache-AB". (with apologies to blood groups :-)
The problem with "universal receiver" licences is that they cannot be mutually compatible without horrible contortions.
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 14:44 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
I.e., if they had wanted other open-source projects' modifications to be under their preferred licence, they should have used a licence that achieves that - assuming that "source code distribution" is a workable bright-line between the "open source project" they want to require code give backs from, and "proprietary, closed use" that they want to permit.
To paraphrase Rob Weird, title and licence is all that matters and don't complain if that doesn't suit you.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 18:30 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 14:47 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 10:08 UTC (Mon) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
I was told that OpenBSD do email campaigns to ask companies to give back source, but I can't find any reference to that.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 11:27 UTC (Mon) by nhippi (guest, #34640) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 20:59 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
The copyright owner gave downstream the right to choose which licence THEY wanted to USE. He did not give them the right to change the licence he granted to their downstream.
Think of it as two separate parts - there is a big variety of licences out there - BSD, MIT, (L)GPL 2 or 2.1 or 3 etc. Note I very carefully did not say there was a licence called GPL2+, or any variant of plus. Because that is not a licence, that is a grant. It tells you which licence(s) you can use.
So if I grant you the right to use either BSD or GPL2+, that does not give you the right to take those choices away from your downstream. If you make a substantial edit to my code, and licence yours differently, that may change the terms on which the combined file may be distributed, but it does not change the terms I applied to my code. And deleting (or altering the meaning of) my notice is, as I say, imho a violation in itself.
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 21:27 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
That may be a distinction you are unique in drawing, AFAICT. (?)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 15:24 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
If you ever were unlucky enough to end up in court over this, you couldn't give the Judge a copy of the "GPL2+" licence. You would have to give him a copy of either/both GPL2 or/and GPL3, and the text that gave you the right to choose between them. And then the Judge would say, "well then, which choice did you make?".
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 15:50 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
In the normal free software way, those terms are stated in each file, and refer to further terms described in other documents. Those terms can indeed give the licensee choices. E.g. to choose to use the GPLv2, or to use some later published licence by the FSF. Even the GPLv2 text within itself contains "either X or Y or Z" terms.
But, I don't see where you get that one of these descriptions is a "licence" and some other is a "grant"? I think you're mixing up words. A licence is granted by the rights-holder(s), and is done by describing the terms of the licence granted in some sufficient way - and those terms may have conditions, choices and refer to further documents with further terms.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 17:09 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 15:31 UTC (Tue) by MarcB (subscriber, #101804) [Link]
A copy-lefted fork ruins this idea, because it turns the simple, straightforward act of adding features into a trade-off.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 15:13 UTC (Mon) by orcmid (guest, #74478) [Link]
There are occasions when cooperation is better than that, as in security matters, although sometimes the security-issue sharing can be clumsy. So far, missteps have been cleaned up.
There have also been cases where folks have contributed material from LibreOffice, but it is found that they do not have the right to do so and AOO reverts those contributions. The project also discourages anyone cherry-picking LibreOffice code and has intervened when that happened.
Finally, the ASF does not have a copyright transfer from Oracle. Oracle provided a license grant that allowed the ASF to release under its license. Oracle retains the copyright. Similarly, developers license their contributions to the ASF, they do not transfer copyright.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 16:11 UTC (Mon) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]
Yes, but that is normally done under either the Apache (or a proprietary) license. What is different here is the the LO community prefers copyleft! And by triple-licensing they would undermine their preferences. So you really are angry that LO prefers to stick to copyleft principles. And that is not because LO devs are inherently enemies of AOO but because they havr a different worldview. Just like the Apache community sees value in a permissively licensed office alternative, they see value in a copyleft alternative.
As Jonathan Corbet said though, rehashing year-old arguments is not going to help here, so AOO should think how they get out of the hole they are in now.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 16:33 UTC (Mon) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]
Nobody want's to see that Oracle plague infested spaghetti-codebase of an leviathan crawling back out of it's hole ( unless you are IBM ).
What people are wanting to see is for ASF to man up, shot it in the head then light it on fire and bury it's remains in the hole it already has dug itself and crawled into. ;)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 17:59 UTC (Mon) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]
*plonk*
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 18:57 UTC (Mon) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]
This was known outcome the day that Oracle touch it and later dropped the ball on the community when it already had left.
This endless rerun of OpenOffice inevitable demise and the melodrama that surrounds OOo and how it has fallen into despair, disrepair, and relative abandonment that as been filling the internet since twenty eleven is long passed it's due.
Just take it into the backyard and out of it's misery before StarOffice legacy gets disgraced even further than it already has.
Accept the reality for what it is and be proud knowing that the legacy that now carries onward and lives in LO once was StarOffice.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 19:40 UTC (Mon) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]
One last comment before I continue ignoring your future posts (you did go into my ignore file). I do object to your impolite and offending bile. Being followed by an emoticon does not make it any less offending and impolite!
I do not know how you come to think I am loyal to OpenOffice, my first commit into the LO repository was on 28-Sep-2010 for what its worth, when was your first constructive contribution besides offending people?
But whatever your stance on LO and AOO, treating people who invest voluntary time with respect is the very least that one can do. One can disagree, one can argue but sentences and analogies like yours are not something that one should tolerate in any civilized community.
*End of communication*
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 21:06 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Are you by any chance related to the famous (in psychiatric circles at least) Dr Albrecht Paetz from AltScherbitz?
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 0:44 UTC (Tue) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]
How I communicate is something I learned after series of events contributing my free time to a community through period ( of rather thankless ) 8 years it's not how I was when I started wet behind my ears but I quickly learned and adapted and build an immunity up to a certain point.
You can see this "dominant" communication method reaching all the way up to the highest level of the linux ecosystem, the kernel community with those being the individuals that set the example and tone for the rest of the linux ecosystem as an role model whether they like it or not.
How people respond,react and perceive communication is based on the environment in which they were raised which shapes their personality thus their "feelings" hence communication can never be "politically correct" no matter how hard it's tried but that does not prevent people from judging them (the perceived role models) as either good or bad ( something which does not exist ) based on that persons own perception which was shaped by that individuals environment.
If you remove the form of communicating from series of word written in text with video/audio instead you will see a completely different behaviour pattern in people and another one if people are met directly in persons.
That said contributing your free time to a community of any kind not just opensource or software in general is thankless work and will continue to be so until children are taught to put value on their own free time hence will start respecting others free time as an result of that.
However in a world driven by greed that's an effort that precisely will be prevented from happening as is being done already for a lot of man made problems which are often associated with the ( incorrect ) term of "saving the planet" when in fact "saving the human race" is the correct one.
Do you perceive the world you are currently living in with the rest of us as being "civilized" or ever been civilized in it's history ?
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 8:53 UTC (Thu) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]
It was **L**GPL for $DEITY sake! Nothing in the world stops IBM (or whoever) to take a whole list of libraries in LO and use them in their ReallyPriceyCMS or whatever. They would just have to help maintain that part of LO they use, which they apparently were too cheap to do.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 14:48 UTC (Mon) by orcmid (guest, #74478) [Link]
So, although this was just a device to allow a different license on LibreOffice distributions, it in fact put LibreOffice downstream from Apache OpenOffice, and that appears in their various notices.
upstream
Posted Sep 5, 2016 18:02 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
If the actual upstream of an important project was in trouble, the downstream would have to choose between fixing it and taking over. But as far as LibreOffice is concerned, since they aren't downstream of you, this isn't a problem for them at all.
upstream
Posted Sep 5, 2016 18:37 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
So if you're talking family trees, LO is more like AOO's aunt, not child.
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 23:31 UTC (Fri) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link]
Why does openoffice.org mention only AOO and not LibreOffice as an equal fork?
Several AOO contributors come off as condescending against LibreOffice. They probably do not even realise it. Even in the discussion at dev@aoo there is some condescending attitude. Such a thing is unacceptable, and probably contributed to the bad situation for AOO.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 13:22 UTC (Sat) by dtardon (subscriber, #53317) [Link]
AOO has done nothing to attract developers: there is no tooling, no infrastructure... LibreOffice has gerrit, continuous integration, regular Coverity builds, regular import tests using a large set of documents, etc. AOO can't even do builds. That's not mentioning all the red tape one has to go through to even become a contributor...
You have never explained how do you envision such sharing without putting all the burden on the consumers of the "common core". We are not talking about changed branding here. Nor is AOO a library/module/whatever that would be only used as a black box. That means that the structure of the consumer projects would be the core repo + a set of patches above it, in whatever way (for illustration, the current diff between AOO and LibreOffice has 14662481 lines and 609 MB). Well, we already seen this: it was called go-oo. And I can well understand why the people who remember it don't want to go back. But again, you've never asked these people about their opinion...
Btw, could you name the projects that are actually interested in such a "common core"? So we don't talk about hypotheticals.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 14:43 UTC (Fri) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]
May I commend you for your public suggestions on the AOO mailing list? I found them sensible and level-headed despite the fact that whatever decisions will be taken (or not), a part of the community will always be unhappy and loudly complaining.
I found one thing especially remarkable in your post: whatever happens, the release of OO.org code under the Apache license was an achievement which should not be forgotten. Libre Office's building on that relicensed code was enabled by AOO.
The continued existence of a stagnant AOO offering insecure downloads however is a harm to the reputation of all Open Source Office suits. (although one could argue that e.g. Abiword is just as big an offender here :-)) And I am glad that the Apache board has noticed and is attempting to remedy the situation. Good luck with whatever path will work for you.
In case of retirement consider donating the OpenOffice(tm) to continue to make use of that brand (although I am not sure that LibreOffice would even consider rebranding at this point).
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 19:58 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The Apache Way is a process which, while not *necessarily* so, can easily be turned into a bureaucratic hellscape if enough contributors want to do so, more or less regardless of the views of any other contributors -- and there are now multiple documented cases of projects moving out of Apache because of certain people who shall remain nameless who migrate from minor project to minor project so that they can get onto their PMC by making trivial contributions for a while, apparently because they bizarrely think being on the PMC is an "important role" -- and then proceed to use that position to try to make the project "more Apache" by trying to force the project to use every form of voting and bureaucracy they possibly can, without considering whether this is actually sensible for the project in question.
In my eyes, this is only distinct from large corporate processes because nobody's getting paid -- oh and also they don't have the argument that huge numbers of people depend on the thing to justify their obstructionism either. (A good rule of thumb is that someone on your PMC is attempting to introduce more e.g. pre-release voting than Apache HTTPD does, that this is probably unjustified! I *wish* this was a joke.)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 20:26 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
If it was felled some other way, we should figure out what that is, rather than endlessly rehashing the same tired old all-the-libreoffice-contributors-are-selfish-noncontributors lines yet again. As Jon has noted, that's the past. Nothing can save AOO now, but it would be nice to know why it died (or why it never took off). Perhaps it was simply that everyone hated Oracle, but, y'know, btrfs was funded by Oracle for years and didn't die. It seems more likely that something Oracle or Apache *did*, or didn't do, kept contributors away. (The most plausible is simply the creation of a new project with a deliberately incompatible license when a perfectly good project based on the same code and with an already-lively contributor base already existed and had for years.)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 14:11 UTC (Fri) by orcmid (guest, #74478) [Link]
LibreOffice provides one such set for *all* localizations, with non-English localizations of built-in help as supplemental. The on-line help is localized of course. For Windows users, the use of signed .msi downloads is also a significant improvement.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 14:45 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
It used to be that way in LO too.
What happened is that, during their cleanup of the sprawling code base, they ended up shrinking the install size a lot. IIRC, they found things like hundreds of duplicated copies of the same image, plenty of unused images, poorly optimized images, and so on. The removal of a large amount of dead code also helped.
The install size shrank so much, that even after adding all localizations, the end result was still smaller than what each single-localization install was before they started the cleanup. Therefore, it was an easy choice to have a single install set for all languages (except for the built-in help, which is separated for each language, and also optional).
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 19:35 UTC (Fri) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]
I recall the size of every LibreOffice/OpenOffice article's comment section here used to be, with few exceptions, on the same order of magnitude as the highly popular systemd debates happening at the time.
By that metric, IBM certainly got their money's worth from him — he single-handedly produced as many lines of output as 20-30 volunteers.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 11:57 UTC (Mon) by ms-tg (subscriber, #89231) [Link]
If so, I observe that Rob Weir was a fantastic example of the concept! I don't know about anyone else, but I personally originally learned of the superior LibreOffice offering, and duly switched my colleagues to it, solely via the enraged replies to Rob Weir's condescending troll comments here on LWN.
This was before the Linux distros all switched to LO, and we were using AOO in a corporate environment. I wouldn't be surprised if Rob Weir was personally responsible for generating the groundswell of support for LO that eventually motivated the distros to switch to it, and thereby cutting off AOO from open source communities entirely.
Did anyone else have a similar experience?
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 12:28 UTC (Mon) by dtardon (subscriber, #53317) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 12:52 UTC (Mon) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 14:05 UTC (Mon) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 10:51 UTC (Fri) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]
The OOo build system was an amazing and terrible abomination, to the point where, quite early on in the OOo project, Ximian (before it had even been bought by Novell) created the ooo-build project, (1) to make it feasible to build on Linux at all (which is why all the distros used it) (2) because Sun were so Not-Invented-Here about outside patches, even from ostensible OOo corporate partners.
of course, ooo-build became Go-oo (which all the distros used), which was a seed for LibreOffice (which all the distros immediately adopted).
Even then, LO spent literally years trying to bring the build system really up to scratch. It wasn't until 2013 that they finished this work.
So the terrible build system is one thing AOO can probably be excused - insofar as the actively unhelpful pointlessness of their existence at all can first be excused.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 18:25 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Many of the patches I submitted worked on the build system. At the time, OO.o took ~8 hours to build on my system (or 2-3 hours thanks to the glorious wonder of ccache). One of the first steps in the build process involved building its own implementation of make, used to run the rest of the build.
I'm deeply impressed by the massive amount of work the LibreOffice project has done to clean up the build system and the codebase.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 0:05 UTC (Sat) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]
I'm deeply impressed by the massive amount of work the LibreOffice project has done to clean up the build system and the codebase.
And my impression is that the truly amazing thing is that they were able to turn that massive cleanup into a recruiting tactic. I remember when LO first came out, they were very up-front about the need to do major cleanup as a prerequisite to further development. Instead of throwing up their hands, they broke it up into small and simple enough pieces that newbies could get their feet wet by doing them. They got their code cleaned up and brought in people who otherwise would have been scared away by the thought of working on such a huge project.
It's a great example of how coding communities aren't usually things that just happen; they require real effort. The projects that succeed are often the ones that work as communities, not necessarily the ones with the best technical direction.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 0:19 UTC (Sat) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 21:45 UTC (Sat) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 15:28 UTC (Mon) by Sweet5hark (guest, #111028) [Link]
- When go-oo was started, it provided some essential build fixes for building on Linux. This was done in a very hackish, non-scalable way though[1].
- By the time LibreOffice was started, the old upstream OpenOffice.org build on Linux had improved incrementally and was a lot less problematic than it used to be. At the same time, the go-oo build however was getting more and more unable to cope with the huge patchset it was drowning under. By this time, building go-oo was a lot more painful than plain OpenOffice.org.
- By the time AOO was started though, the go-oo patchset and most of the new gbuild build system has been merged in LibreOffice, while ~nothing had happened on the AOO code wrt to making it easy to build.
So: go-oo was harder to use than Suns OpenOffice.org in the end on Linux, while LibreOffice -- from mid-3.5[2] on -- was a _lot_ easier to build than both go-oo or Suns OpenOffice.org ever where.
[1] see also: http://lwn.net/Articles/699291/
[2] mostly due to: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/One_Git_C...
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 9:08 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
This was a trivial bug fix. There is no subtlety involved, no tricky race conditions or anything like that; yet somehow the AOO project dragged its heels until the reporter grew impatient and said they'd go public. Then they persuaded the reporter to keep their mouth shut for more than an extra month and STILL couldn't get their act together enough to ship the actual fix. The awful (manually replace a DLL, really, in 2016?) mitigation took an extra month after that, as Apache "contributors" struggled to do things like read the instructions and try them out.
"Retirement" of this project is insurance for the wider Apache project against the case where a zero day is found and they realise, to their growing horror, that this is somehow their fault even though they have no relevant expertise and no ability to respond. That's the sort of thing that could engulf even seemingly unrelated projects like Apache httpd. Who would run a HTTP daemon from some clowns who can't even solve a serious zero day without weeks of useless hand-wringing and delay ?
Things wider Apache should be thinking about: When did _they_ learn that CVE-2016-1513 was outstanding, how trivial it was yet how long AOO were sat on it? Why didn't that raise any red flags ? If the answer is "that's a job for the PMC not us" then alas the new questions are "What mechanisms are in place to ensure the PMC is doing a halfway competent job? How would you know if they were hiding things from you?" and that may have some very unpleasant lessons beyond AOO.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 9:30 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/openoffice/pmc/BoardRepo...
Significant comments that are made:
"The buildbot for Windows binaries has not been successful since 2015-07-28."
"Requests for review can go unanswered."
"Proof of concept for digital signing of Windows builds was achieved in 2014. Signing is not in production."
Notable by its absence is any mention of CVE-2016-1513 (not just that identifier, but the underlying problem, threat of imminent disclosure, inability to usefully respond), and while Apache has a separate "Security team" there's no obvious clue they were aware of this issue at that time, or that if they were they felt the need to tell the board.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 14:17 UTC (Fri) by orcmid (guest, #74478) [Link]
It is correct that the original report was in 2015, not 2016. I'll fix that.
- Dennis
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 12:14 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
On another thread (https://lwn.net/Articles/698803/), I followed what I think is the commit for this CVE, and found that LO had fixed the same issue in 2014-09-10, around two years ago. The LO commit mentions "valgrind + bff", and from what I've found, it seems "bff" is a fuzzer. That is, more than a year before it was reported as a vulnerability to AOO (assuming your guess of 2015 is correct), the LO developers ran a fuzzer together with valgrind, found this bug and fixed it.
The LO developers use many static analyzers (coverity, cppcheck, running the compiler with -Werror, and so on), and also things like running the ever-growing test suite under valgrind, and fix the issues reported. A few of these fixes might end up fixing security issues, as seems to have been the case here.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 9:29 UTC (Fri) by jimbotux (guest, #108931) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 10:28 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Apache's reputation can be salvaged by nothing short of shutting the entire project down and re-configuring the web site, wiki, bug tracker, and every other user ingress point to redirect users towards LibreOffice.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 10:59 UTC (Fri) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 11:24 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
HOPEFULLY there are LO devs involved in other capacities at Apache, who will argue that this is a self-inflicted wound and, as such, the trademark should be handed to LO.
Actually, I'm not sure how these things work, but is it possible for LO to file for the trademark for "OpenOffice"? (Or "LO Open Office".) And specifically note in the filing that (a) they are a direct descendant of the original holder, and (b) it will not be used to compete with the current holder of the related marks but (c) it will damage their business if the marks are abandoned and a third party starts using them. That way, if/as Apache abandons the trademarks, they can move in.
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 16:21 UTC (Fri) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]
Redirecting openoffice.org visitors to libreoffice.org and mentioning the "handover" in their announcements should be enough, no need for a trademark transfer which would only slow the process.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 16:39 UTC (Fri) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]
The trademark remains ridiculously valuable, I think. For the ostensible purpose of trademarks: protection of the end consumer.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 9:24 UTC (Tue) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]
All that's really needed is for openoffice.org to aknowledge that LibreOffice exists and redirect clueless visitors to libreoffice.org. That'll take care of the public recognition problem relatively quickly. The trademark and website don't necessarily need to be handed over to TDF: Apache could keep maintaining it, maybe turn it into a community portal where both LO and AOO (maybe also NeoOffice ?) have a voice. Let AOO get its own domain name and continue to exist as long as developers care for it. But don't anger the general community by having the most well-known domain name only point to the project that is currently the least-loved one.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 11:43 UTC (Tue) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
I'd add (to the bare minimum damage control actions) also point the auto-updater to something that responds, so existing openoffice users don't get stuck with a still program that never gets security fixes (even after some of the vulnerabilities are announced by the LO's commit when the code is still common)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 16:55 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]
Apache really needs to work with LibreOffice to resolve this issue. The details about what/who/when was right or wrong is really irrelevant as far as this subject is concerned. The trademark is more important then that.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 21:13 UTC (Fri) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]
When I mentioned the AOO struggles on social media a few months back, at least one of my friends admitted to still using OOo, having missed the existence of both LO *and* AOO!
Trademark
Posted Sep 2, 2016 12:22 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
In this context, it's interesting to see that Apache's Jim Jagielski suggests that the OpenOffice web sites could be redirected to LibreOffice. He also thinks the OOo code base should be made into a library project that LO (and others) could build on.
Trademark
Posted Sep 2, 2016 13:48 UTC (Fri) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]
Trademark
Posted Sep 3, 2016 16:14 UTC (Sat) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
I get it, TDF didn't exist when Apache took over the OOo codebase. But jimjag doesn't seem to get it, LO was a continuation (including in licensing terms) of go-oo, which itself arose because of inadequacies in OOo. It was not a direct continuation of OOo. The Apache people may have wanted to change the licence of AOO to a "permissive" one but there is no logical reason LO should have gone through the effort to do the same -- there was already considerable divergence with license incompatibility in the codebase, and it would have been quite non-trivial to relicense under AOO's "permissive" license, even if desirable (which is debatable).
That being so, the "one-way flow" that jimjag complains about is pretty much inevitable. Though there are posts talking about how some LO people did want to contribute to AOO but were thwarted by the latter's dysfunctionality.
I'm sure jimjag never meant harm, but the reality was that when AOO got started LO was already a fully functional project that had progressed well ahead of the last Sun OOo release. It didn't help to allow attack dogs like rcweir to run loose. So while jimjag's suggestion of having AOO redirect people to LO is really the sanest possible suggestion, I'm not sure all that other preamble in his mail is helpful.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 12:29 UTC (Fri) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
No need for your mind to boggle since what is making it boggle never happened.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 13:52 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 14:16 UTC (Fri) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
But that is not the case.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 14:49 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 15:35 UTC (Mon) by orcmid (guest, #74478) [Link]
It is an useful idea to put something on the download page with regard to the AOO security bulletins. Thank you for that. There are other places where user-facing information about security activities would also be handy.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 10:15 UTC (Mon) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link]
Perhaps an outsider should have been sought to establish whether there were indeed sufficient resources.
LibreOffice was already about one year old when you started the "incubation" process and you missed the fast pace that they were gaining new developers and producing new releases. Fast.
Instead, the Apache Foundation has been developing AOO as if it was a network service or a system library.
It was only two years later since the start of AOO that you even tried to woo contributors for documentation, translations, etc.
How do *you* woo contributors? You post "Call for <insert type> volunteers" and expect people will come and self-organize.
That used to be "best practice" ten years ago, but not any more. The attempt to get contributors in late 2012/early 2013 did not work too well. Apart from developers, you did not have enough people to lead other required aspects of the development of an office suite.
> No need for your mind to boggle since what is making it boggle never happened.
That is the second paragraph of your reply. It shows that you are irritated and you try to belittle the top poster,
to get them to not bother to reply. Not bother to reply even if your first paragraph is just your firmly-held belief that appeared not to be enough (the sufficient resources) in the end.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 11:54 UTC (Mon) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
From what I could gather from the AOO mailing list, that's exactly what they are doing right now.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 11:48 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
The main problem with AOO failing, is that users of non-Linux systems keep using it, not out of preference but because that's all they know. If the trademark is abandoned, it opens the door for unscrupulous malware peddlers to grab it for themselves.
If AOO closes its doors, it would be better to donate the trademark to one of the derivatives (probably to TDF since LO is the most active one). Even then, it has to be used for an office suite or it will be lost, so the new owner would probably have to make a derivative of its own derivative and name it OpenOffice.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 12:24 UTC (Fri) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/6d3bb86f8abc1ae88f3a...
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 14:12 UTC (Fri) by martin.langhoff (guest, #61417) [Link]
Deeper rifts have healed in the past. The important work from AOO will not be forgotten, and does indeed live on in LO.
A friendly discussion around the trademark would serve the wider community well. Surely AOO hates the bottom feeders pitching fake OO builds more than fellow travelers at LO ...
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 20:49 UTC (Fri) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]
Oh my, digging again into the history, there has been so much misunderstanding, accusations and conspiracy theories hurled around on both sides, that I am not sure about this.
If one of the most active committer publicly states things like:
"Let me state this openly for those unaware: there are dark powers in play that want Apache OpenOffice as a project, as a product, and as a community to fail. It is not a coincidence that a redhat employee was openly asking to kill this project (for some issue with his mom - really)."
I am not sure whether I should laugh or cry about these honest beliefs. Rob Weir seemed to focus more attention to defaming LO than to improve AOO. His 2012 classic series of "LibreOffice’s Dubious Claims" http://www.robweir.com/blog/page/23 still makes my blood boil :-). I am sure there are similar statements to be found on the other side if one looks, though.
I am not sure why so many call for a "reunification" of the projects. We all know you can't just stay friends after a divorce ;)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 1:09 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
You'll be surprised. In FLOSS we take things personally. Rob Weir was the biggest culprit, and he's gone. Especially if the head honchos at Apache (rather than the AOO personnel) start knocking heads together, there's no reason why LO and AOO can't discuss this rationally and come to a sensible arrangement.
And I think the most important thing is that the trademark isn't abandoned. Even if it's just an agreement that the trademark can be used freely by any descendent of the original StarOffice.
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 16:19 UTC (Fri) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link]
> There are a lot of people out there who seem to have it in for AOO and have for a while...
Uhmm yeah. LO was a vibrant project when AOO was first considered. go-ooo and LO had quite a following and a lot of good will in the Linux/free software world. OO.o and then AOO not joining that effort was seen as a massive f-you to many including myself. In fact it inspired me personally to contribute to LO. I certainly think less of Apache as an organisation for taking on AOO even before the current debacle.
I personally look forward to the AOO project failing. Why? As a lesson to Apache and future corporate donors. And to hopefully move users toward the far superior LO.
I'm sure you will just have me pegged as a hater, but I see AOO as actively providing a disservice to users and the community by distracting from the true place of advancement for the code base. Not to mention spreading unpatched vulnerabilities and giving open source/free software a bad name.
> If we look at LibreOffice and compare:
> LibreOffice, that is *good* (not more) software and *excellent* public relations.
> OpenOffice, that is *exellent* software and *pretty bad* public relations.
I'm not sure how anyway can say that with a straight face in respect to the software. The amount of clean up LO has done is staggering and the code base is so much nicer to work with. The functioning build system should be a pretty good indication of that. The sane localization scheme they have. And the rate at which they are adding new features.
As far as the PR is concerned, it's pretty hard to have good PR when the whole basis of the project is to say FU to another more active project.
Having a strong project with regular releases and feature advancement is pretty good PR in itself.
Shows me the delusion is pretty strong in the AOO world. AOO supporters are quick to flame and point fingers, but can't actually be bother working on the code.
Once again, not a community I would expect too many people to be keen to join.
> I would suggest we focus on not being one, but instead being a framework or library that can be consumed by actual end-user implementations.
Oh my sides. It's clear LO has captured dev mind share far more than AOO. The lingering momentum and brand recognition means you still have a large user base. Yet you propose AOO stop targeting users and instead target devs? As far as bridges go, I think that one is pretty well burned. Nuked from orbit even.
I would certainly vote against my own meagre LO contributions being re-licensed or otherwise related/donated toward AOO in any shape or form.
Meanwhile LO has a good SDK with documentation and projects that actually use it including online services and Android applications. Once again AOO would have a lot of catching up to do.
> never we forget how members of OpenOffice (for example, Rob Weir) were insulted by TDF representatives.
Hilarious. Rob Weir's insulting & antagonizing on this very forum is what inspired me to become a LO contributor.
You don't have to go far here to find people who dislike Rob and his LO bashing.
From https://lwn.net/Articles/565731/
> After that, I see almost anything AOO says as lies.
> Certainly AOO is dying, concretely of rcweir poisoning.
I especially love this now ironic exchange where Rob craps on LO for talking about it's build system improvements. The very ones AOO failed to do and now is paralysed by:
http://lwn.net/Articles/554363/
Quite frankly I've never seen such widespread negativity toward an open source project across so many forums. You surely have to stop and ask yourself if you and Apache are on the right side of history here? And why would a developer be attracted to contribute to a project that carries so much bad-will?
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-pho...
> Hopefully they give it up soon - Apache has done quite a lot of harm to the open-source office world.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/50rt8i/apache_ope...
> As this situation goes on, misplaced AOO pride is getting in the way of sensible decisions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747
> Everybody is using LibreOffice, except a poor few that get misguided by search services to the Apache OpenOffice website. IMHO there is no sane reason why Apache OpenOffice still exists.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 21:42 UTC (Fri) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
One could apply the above both to people at AOO as well as people at LO. No side is completely pure in this.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 3:04 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]
That said, I try not to judge all AOOers by that one guy. I mean, you seem perfectly reasonable. But boy, he managed to earn a lot of ill-will in a lot of places.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 11:08 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
It was quite noticeable that the few articles about AOO didn't attract any where near the same number of (unfavourable) comparisons with LO, as the number of posts comparing LO unfavourably with AOO in an LO article.
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 11:12 UTC (Sat) by edomaur (subscriber, #14520) [Link]
Well, after that, why would I be interested to help AOO ? They didn't seems to be nice people... At least it looked like this to my eyes and probably to the eyes of more people.
So, now, the question is still up : what will AOO do to get more devs ? (I say "will" not "can".)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 9, 2016 8:01 UTC (Fri) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 22:37 UTC (Fri) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
Kinda accurately actually. The venom you hold towards AOO and Apache is palpable. And why? Because AOO had the gall to accept the OO donation from Oracle when the alternative was assuredly that Oracle would either shutter it completely or sell it to IBM? So you blame, and hate, Apache for being chosen when LO and the not-yet-legally-existing TDF was not? Even after LO is in MUCH better shape now that its IP provenance is significantly improved with the fact that the OO code was donated and relicensed, as well as that LO continues to this day picking from AOO whatever patches and improvements are of use... And for all this you "personally look forward to the AOO project failing" as a "lesson to Apache and future corporate donors". And this seems reasonable to you? Really??? Maybe you don't quite understand what the word "hater" means.
Thankfully, more reasoned minds exist on both sides.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 23:34 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]
Let just hope Apache does the right thing in the end and gives the trademarks to LO.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 0:07 UTC (Sat) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
I can say for the record that your comment about Apache assisting that "knowingly and deliberately" is 100% false. People should be embarrassed in thinking that.
As far as Oracle donating to Apache to "spite" LO... there are many, many reasons why Oracle did that. One is that at the time the TDF didn't legally exist: there was no legal entity to donate it to. Secondly, Oracle wanted the code to be permissively licensed. They can want that. It's their code. This was something LO did not want. As far as whether or not "spite" has anything to do with it, who knows? I am sure there are many who think that TDF/LO refuse to contribute back to AOO is solely to "spite" Apache... Sometimes such petty emotions and actions have wide-ranging results.
Apache accepted the donation in good faith. You are proposing that instead we should had operated in bad faith. This seems to say more about your moral standing than Apache's.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 0:27 UTC (Sun) by bunk (subscriber, #44933) [Link]
LO is an associated project of SPI since March 2011.
SPI is a US 501 (c) that mostly handles donations, but also owns the trademarks of associated projects like Debian and Jenkins.
I am a member of SPI, and I do not think there would have been any opposition from SPI against serving as legal entity for assets like trademark and code until the TDF was legally established.
(OO.org was also an associated project of SPI from 2007 until May 2012, when it asked to leave and its funds were transferred to the ASF.)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 18:36 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
However, I'm happy to see that this might finally get resolved. It's always sad when a project people cared about dies, no matter the circumstances and no matter the number of people who cared. But I'm hopeful for a graceful transition, and I hope that anyone still interested can find a welcoming home in the LibreOffice project.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 22:27 UTC (Fri) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
I find it sad that even in death, the Apache OpenOffice project continues to claim that "alternatives never contributed back", as though it was the authoritative "upstream" to which all others should defer, despite having almost no developer mindshare. Developers had already moved to ooo-build long before it evolved into LibreOffice. There was very sufficient mindshare, thank you. As far as the comment about "alternatives never contributed back", that is simply true and, despite your poo-pooing of it, is an important part of the discussion as well as an important part of how we got where we are. Certainly one of the concepts of FOSS is "giving back" isn't it. In fact, LO uses licensing that *requires it*. So they obviously believe that giving back is important. What is weird is that what they demand of their users they refused to a codebase which they admittedly used and obtained code from. Of course, the ALv2 does not require it. So does that mean that people who gave back to AOO even though they didn't have to are more honorable and altruistic open source people than TDF/LO?? That the reason why they didn't give back to AOO is because they specifically wanted AOO to die? That instead of using copyleft to ensure code remains free, they instead used it to benefit themselves by sacrificing another project? I leave these questions for others to answer.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 23:14 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
> There was very sufficient mindshare, thank you.
Saying it doesn't make it so, and the many articles reported here on LWN (https://lwn.net/Articles/637735/ for instance) suggest otherwise, leading up to this article observing that the project may not have enough support to continue.
> As far as the comment about "alternatives never contributed back", that is simply true
The word "alternatives" already presumes a problematic perspective that others do not share. AOO was, at best, one of several successors to OpenOffice.org; it was not in any way a more "natural" successor, nor in a privileged position to expect contributions. Maintaining a development community requires active effort, and minimizing barriers to contribution. LibreOffice is not a downstream project failing to contribute changes upstream. One could just as easily ask why the AOO folks didn't go work on LibreOffice.
Also worth pointing out that the AOO has a Contributor License Agreement, which LibreOffice does not. Why should developers agree to that when they can contribute to a project with fewer barriers to contribution? Why should developers do extra work to contribute to two projects when they can concentrate on one?
Should the Jenkins project have worried about whether Hudson could incorporate their changes? (Anyone else remember Hudson? Very similar situation there, with the Eclipse Foundation taking that project. It still seems to get occasional security releases, but doesn't appear to have any significant development activity.)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 0:12 UTC (Sat) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
Really, if you are going to engage in a conversation and discussion, at least have the facts correct. Engaging in strawmen arguments is soooo tiring.
Finally: you ask "One could just as easily ask why the AOO folks didn't go work on LibreOffice"... because they didn't need to. Their code and contributions, if useful, were immediately consumed by LO. They were, in fact, working on both so to speak.
Thanks for trying however!
AOO Gumption traps
Posted Sep 3, 2016 0:45 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
AOO has a lot of gumption traps. Opportunities for your enthusiasm to get sapped by uninteresting and largely unrelated problems. You want to fix a typo and you end up realising that to really fix the typo you need to develop a complete replacement for a key part of the build subsystem and eh... can't be bothered time to play Overwatch for an hour.
Gumption traps aren't the main problem, which is straight forward lack of developer manpower, but they make that problem worse AND they make fixing it harder. If I got a hankering to contribute fixes to a Free Software office productivity program (as I have in the past, I knew _way_ too much about Excel BIFF structures) why would I waste my time with AOO and risk stepping in a gumption trap ? Even if Rob Weir hadn't ensured I had a bad impression of AOO, the better developer experience with LibreOffice makes that the obvious choice.
AOO Gumption traps
Posted Sep 3, 2016 1:00 UTC (Sat) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 0:49 UTC (Sat) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Yes. And questions like that are needlessly insulting and dismissive.
> Do you even know that a Contributor License Agreement (actually an iCLA) is only required for people who have commit privs?
https://openoffice.apache.org/contributing-code.html paints a different picture, and rather strongly suggests that any non-trivial contribution may require a CLA. It also states that the code must be under the Apache 2.0 license, which is not something that anyone other than the author of the code can change, so in general most code would have to be submitted by its author. In general, that page clearly outlines several non-trivial barriers to contribution.
(Note that Apache 2.0 isn't the original license of the OO.o codebase either, so it has no more or less claim to being the "right" license to use. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Industry_Standards_Sour... , "Later versions of OpenOffice.org were dual-licensed under the SISSL and LGPL until the retirement of the SISSL, at which time OpenOffice.org was relicensed only under the LGPL.")
And even just a barrier to obtaining commit privileges hurts a community, which needs developers with commit privileges to thrive.
> Do you even know that the Apache individual Contributor License Agreement is not a copyright assignment but only a license agreement
I'm well aware of how CLAs work, and the difference between them and copyright assignments. However, a CLA is still a legal agreement that falls in a different category than a standard Open Source software license, and results in one more barrier to contribution. In addition to driving away potential individual contributors, CLAs also make life more difficult for potential corporate contributors.
> Finally: you ask "One could just as easily ask why the AOO folks didn't go work on LibreOffice"... because they didn't need to. Their code and contributions, if useful, were immediately consumed by LO. They were, in fact, working on both so to speak.
No, they weren't; the LO folks were doing the work to incorporate any useful AOO changes. Meanwhile, the nature of the contribution requirements for AOO would have required the LO folks to do the work to push their own changes back into AOO, even assuming they wanted to agree to the additional terms. Why would they take the time to do so? What benefit would that have had? Why not spend that time doing even more development work for LO or another project?
> Thanks for trying however!
Do you make it standard practice to passive-aggressively insult, belittle, and dismiss people you reply to?
In any case, I'm really not interested in continuing this argument. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it's sad to see a project end when people cared about it, and AOO clearly had some people who cared deeply about it. My sympathies.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 2:46 UTC (Sat) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
Well, unless one holds copyright for something, or it is suitably licensed, one doesn't have permission to contribute anything. In most cases you want contributions from the author because that shows a clear and defined IP provenance history. Otherwise you need to make sure that whoever is doing the contribution actually has rights to make it. The above seems to imply that you don't take IP provenance too seriously, which I am sure is not the case.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 3:44 UTC (Sat) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
"or it is suitably licensed" would be the operative case. It's normally perfectly fine to (for instance) pick up code under an MIT license and contribute it to a GPL-licensed project, documenting its origin and preserving copyright and license notices.
Many projects get by just fine without a CLA, or with something as minimal as the Linux kernel's "Signed-off-by" process, rather than a CLA's contractual agreement between a contributor and a project.
The problems with CLAs, and the ways in which they limit and discourage contribution, are well-documented in numerous places and don't need rehashing here. Whether you feel they're worth that price or not, the fact remains that one project had a CLA and the other did not. That's one less barrier for potential contributors to deal with.
> The above seems to imply that you don't take IP provenance too seriously, which I am sure is not the case.
If you were sure it's not the case, then why say it? If you're interested in coming across as reasonable, you may wish to refrain from belittling anyone you see as disagreeing with your perspective on history and how you wish that history might have happened differently.
(And for the record, I deal with software licenses, CLAs, and similar issues professionally.)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 8:10 UTC (Sat) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]
In locally relevant discussion, how about this example: https://lwn.net/Articles/443989/ "OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements"
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 14:24 UTC (Sat) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
If someone submits something extremely large, with questionable IP provenance, the project may request/require a iCLA or Grant to maintain strict provenance. Surely you understand the importance of such in FOSS projects and why such things may be needed. It is easy to be willy-nilly about provenance; it is also quite dangerous. Since at Apache it is important to us that the code actually be *used*, we remove as many roadblocks as possible that would have someone question such usage. Exemplary IP provenance is one such advantage.
Please note that in almost all cases where CLAs are problematic it is when they are *copyright* assignments, not license assignments. So your point about "well documented" problems is moot.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 17:26 UTC (Sat) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
I can't help but observe the irony there.
> Please note that in almost all cases where CLAs are problematic it is when they are *copyright* assignments, not license assignments.
The term "CLA" doesn't normally refer to a copyright assignment. Copyright assignments are even more problematic, but CLAs still create a barrier to contribution.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 17:42 UTC (Sat) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
That is simply untrue. The vast majority of people normally think of CLAs as assigning copyright, due the general prevalence of such usage in FOSS.
Yes, in those cases where a CLA is *required* I could see how some would interpret that as a barrier. However, in those cases, not having one puts the end user at risk and creates a barrier for *their* usage.
Sometimes legal things are required. One can either see that as a barrier or as protection.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 20:49 UTC (Sun) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]
Do you have a link to the study or other source for this claim? As someone who's generally interested in such community matters, this would be very useful to me.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 11:21 UTC (Sat) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 0:40 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Actually, it's dead easy to explain. You yourself will know how hard it is to relicence a code base, having done all the checks on the OO codebase.
ALL the LO code has ALWAYS been MPL. And LO predates AOO by many years - there is a LOT of code there.
So in order for LO to contribute "back" to AOO, they would have had to have gone through a massive code relicencing exercise, and unlike the Oracle/Apache deal, it wasn't as simple as just checking the provenance of the code. It would have been a major exercise in contacting every contributor and asking them to agree to the change - bit like relicencing the linux kernel, in fact, a massive job.
Don't forget, there is a LONG history, going back through Oracle and right back to Sun, of the owners of OO making it very hard to contribute.
And as someone who made minor contributions, I was in favour of adding Apache to the standard MPL/LGPL LO licence statement. Until Rob poisoned the well ... But that would still have left Apache with a problem - they wouldn't have been able to use the large codebase that formed the original basis for LO precisely because of the historical MPL.
(Oh - and Go-OO chose the MPL precisely to be friendly to people like IBM - their behaviour in this, and especially Rob Weir, was seen as a betrayal not surprisingly.)
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 2:35 UTC (Sat) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 13:06 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Note - I didn't set policy, but most of the licencing stuff on the TDF wiki is (or was, it may have been updated) my work. And it certainly didn't set out to discourage people adding Apache to the list of licences on their work.
If there had been an effort on the part of AOO to reach out and get Apache on the list of LO standard licences, I can't say whether it would have succeeded, but I'm certainly unaware of any such effort.
Unfortunately, I'm only too well aware of the AOO spokes-troll's attempts to antagonise LO devs ... :-(
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 18:36 UTC (Sat) by dtardon (subscriber, #53317) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 15:56 UTC (Mon) by orcmid (guest, #74478) [Link]
It is the case that at some point LibreOffice requested dual-license statements from its contributors, so that contributions past and future were under both LGPL and MPL from them. Of course they did not reach all contributors.
The LGPL2 does not allow code that is strictly under the LGPL2 to be dual-licensed, and the code base that LibreOffice forked was under the LGPL2 exclusively (apart from dependencies that may have been different, even permissive, even strict GPL).
That's why the "rebasing" of LibreOffice on Apache OpenOffice's APLv2 code base was done. Then the changes that LibreOffice had evolved got them to what is now released with MPL on top. And finally, the current releases of LibreOffice are not dual licensed. That is easy to verify by inspection of the notices and also code files.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 16:43 UTC (Mon) by chirlu (guest, #89906) [Link]
This is somewhat true, but at the same time misleading. MPL2 allows code to be used in LGPL2.1+, GPL2+, AGPL3+ projects; by intersection with AL2 (which is incompatible with LGPL2.1 and GPL2), that means that LibreOffice is effectively available under LGPL3+, GPL3+ and AGPL3+ as well.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 15:50 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
The whole point of the GPL's "universal recipient" status is that it guarantees that, if you comply with the GPL, you are also complying with any other compatible licence.
In other words, if you use LO MPL code in your own project, you MUST comply with the MPL. It's just that the GPL is stricter so if you comply with the GPL then you just happen also to be complying with the MPL.
If you argue in court over LO code and say "but I complied with the GPL", the court's response will be "but the GPL doesn't apply. Guilty". If you argue, however, "I complied with the GPL, which is a superset of the MPL", the response will be "okay, so you complied with the MPL. Innocent".
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 15:44 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
> It is the case that at some point LibreOffice requested dual-license statements from its contributors, so that contributions past and future were under both LGPL and MPL from them. Of course they did not reach all contributors.
You are correct that LO now requests (and archives) statements from its contributors that code should be licenced as LGPL3/MPL2. Actually, I was involved with LO from the days before the MPL2 existed, and was involved (in a very minor way) in the transition from MPL1 to MPL2.
But to the best of my knowledge ALL the LO code has ALWAYS been licenced MPL in one form or another. The GO-OO project was MPL-licenced. If I'm wrong, what licence did Go-OO use before they settled on the MPL? So this "they didn't reach all contributors" is irrelevant in that that code would have been MPL1, which permits upgrading to MPL2.
That is why I always draw the distinction between the two codebases that make up the LO distribution. The original code was the Star/Sun/Oracle code, originally licenced LPGL2 then LGPL3 (and now rebased to Apache), and then there was the Go-OO add-on code, which I now refer to as "true LO code", which as I say to the best of my knowledge has always been MPL.
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 19:43 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
- AOO is licensed under terms that *do not* require "giving back". Why would a project that believes that code should be distributed under terms that require "giving back", give to a project that would require that code need *not* be "given back"?
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 18:45 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
If the LO devs won't "take back", then that is down to them...
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 14:06 UTC (Fri) by orcmid (guest, #74478) [Link]
- Dennis
What has AOO got that LO doesn't ?
Posted Sep 2, 2016 16:11 UTC (Fri) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]
But there's one comment that got me head-scratching in http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg...
> LibreOffice, that is *good* (not more) software and *excellent* public relations.
> OpenOffice, that is *exellent* software and *pretty bad* public relations.
I don't mean to be derisive, but what part of the software can be rated as "excellent" for AOO but merely "good" for LO ? AFAIK LO wins on every front nowadays, so either I'm heavily biased/uninformed or this AOO contributor is. The only thing that I know of where AOO can be consired supperior is its license, but that depends on your POV, it doesn't seem to be what the poster had in mind, and it is dwarfed by all the AOO problems. Does AOO have a killer-feature ? Do they put emphasis on being correct rather than feature-rich ? Are some of the refactorings done by LO detrimental ?
These questions aren't rethorical or sarcastic. I'd actually be happy to learn that something else than stubbornness, loyalty, or bureaucracy has prevented AOO from fully disapearing already.
What has AOO got that LO doesn't ?
Posted Sep 2, 2016 22:28 UTC (Fri) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
Actually, the idea of AOO being a common, shared resource (although also an end-user application as well), was present at the start.
What has AOO got that LO doesn't ?
Posted Sep 3, 2016 22:33 UTC (Sat) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]
What has AOO got that LO doesn't ?
Posted Sep 5, 2016 16:07 UTC (Mon) by orcmid (guest, #74478) [Link]
In terms of fact-based information, there are ample sources of data on issue handling, development activity, etc. I suggest that anyone concerned about that can dig into those details.
Please don't assume those are positions of the project as a whole or of the Apache Software Foundation.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 2, 2016 23:17 UTC (Fri) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link]
When he got involved with OOo, he used his war skills against LibreOffice. That did not play well. He also made grave mistakes with community building at AOO and no good community was built.
In the end, open-source office suites are suffering and progress has been slower that expected.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 0:40 UTC (Sat) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]
At the end, the team behind Apache OpenOffice projet have no one but themselves to blame with their toxic approach and their abuse of OpenOffice.org brand. Reading comments suggest one of AOO representative still haven't learned the lesson during these six years of project since the handover from Oracle. One has to admire the tenacity of AOO despite the obvious lack of manpower and the outstanding issues from the application begging to put an end to its misery.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 0:48 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
That's what the corporates forget. FLOSS is built on *personal* reputations - the employer doesn't matter that much. And that's what makes things, well, personal. To say "it's just business" in that environment is to turn yourself into a target for everyone. What's that quote again? "Only the King of Fools would open a war on many fronts at once"?
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 10:22 UTC (Sat) by SukSuk (guest, #110996) [Link]
No need for a fancy corporation to take over. IMHO any medium size, less known, preferably non-American company will be the best.
This is a big world and there is room for both OOo and LO. A merge is the worst solution.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 11:58 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
And why do you think that?
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 13:10 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
I've seen too much reduction of choice in the Office market. Word-processors are now mostly Word clones. I *HATE* them.
The sooner LO turns its attentions towards cloning the good features of WordPerfect the better. I keep saying I'm going to get WP 6 working in emulation on my system, but my trouble at the moment is getting DosBox networking working so I can communicate from WP to the rest of the system ...
Oh for more time to play, and *concentrate* on a problem - that's what I need.
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 17:29 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 18:19 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 20:52 UTC (Sat) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 11:33 UTC (Sun) by ianmcc (subscriber, #88379) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 13:44 UTC (Sat) by SukSuk (guest, #110996) [Link]
2. It is impossible to implement all features and enhancements in one product.
3. Fighting more products is more difficult to M$, fighting less products is less difficult to M$.
4. More end users = more power to the Open Document Format.
5. Better options for niche users.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 21:47 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
Yeah, which is why SysV-derived UNIX systems now rule the world, after all there was a lot of competition between those. Oh wait, there wasn't.
>It is impossible to implement all features and enhancements in one product.
Name one improvement in AOO/LO that can't be implemented in the other one.
> Fighting more products is more difficult to M$, fighting less products is less difficult to M$.
M$? Grow up. Besides, that's nonsense anyway since what's actually happening is that AOO and LO are competing for developers and bickering amongst each other. And even when they don't I still don't see the point. Different implementations are bound to have all kinds of interoperability problems, which basically means that sooner or laters users will gravitate toward a single option since that's where you'll get the smallest amount of hassles. Seriously, what fraction of Linux users use Gnome Office or Calligra Office rather than an OOo derivative?
> Better options for niche users.
This sort of thing doesn't work monotonically. Just because a few options are better than a single one doesn't mean that having even more options is better still. You get all sorts of ill effects: interoperability problems, competition human resources etc., and you reach diminishing returns when it comes to the upsides of having more options. There is a sweet spot for the number of competing projects, and it's not at all clear we haven't exceeded that spot yet. And in fact it seems unlikely: there are hardly enough resources to keep AOO going at all, let alone compete with LO in a meaningful way.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 1:32 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
This was of course meant to say “oh wait, they don't”. Oops...
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 18:27 UTC (Sun) by SukSuk (guest, #110996) [Link]
Bugzilla has many great enhancements and feature requests yet to be implemented, some can not coexist due to the conflicting nature of the requests.
Remember how everything started - "Sun Microsystems acquired the company, copyright and trademark of StarOffice in 1999 for US$73.5 million, as it was supposedly cheaper than 42,000 licenses of Microsoft Office."
"Variety's the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavor." - William Cowper
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 19:47 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Usually, the first one in the market rules the world: MS-DOS August 1981, Linux October 1991...
CP/M preceded MS-DOS as some kind of de-facto standard and was widely used on contemporary hardware. Various Unix-alikes preceded GNU/Linux, even on Intel x86, and were also widely used. So I and many others would dispute this "usually"-qualified assertion.
And you can find plenty of examples of the first-mover not "ruling the world", mostly because those first-movers were either doing the groundwork for everyone else or pushing the limits of affordable technology in order to prove their concept, with subsequent-movers being able to deliver the goods profitably once technology costs had been reduced and/or infrastructure costs paid down or written off.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 17:54 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Like so many other products, it was sabotaged by MS. Being first or last is irrelevant. Being a proponent of the American "dirty tricks" school of capitalism seems to be a pretty good tactic (unless you're a European company - the European courts tend to take a far stronger line against it).
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 10, 2016 1:07 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 14, 2016 18:22 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Given that WP was the dominant word processor on DOS, do you *really* think it likely that M$ would ship an update to Win3.1 that would reliably break it?
Or ship an office suite that would reliably kill a pre-installed WordPerfect stone dead?
That's not anecdotes. That's personal experience. I could predictably kill WordPerfect by installing an M$ update. And as I say - they were the dominant word processor at the time. I can't believe that was an accident ...
And if you read the court case, it is very clear that M$'s communications with WordPerfect Corp over Win95 were absolutely full of porkies. "WordPerfect for Win95" relied heavily on functionality that was in the beta copies of 95, but was pulled for the release version! Which is probably why MS Office was so full of back doors - maybe it was this code that was moved into Office rather than Windows, or maybe the Office team were "encouraged" not to use the official API precisely because M$ senior management were planning this "bait and switch" for a long time. Unfortunately, Novell waited for the Netscape trial to finish before pressing their own claims, and got timed out. They should have opened the case and asked the Judge to toll it until the DoJ case finished.
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 20:22 UTC (Sun) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 20:42 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> Usually, the first one in the market rules the world: MS-DOS August 1981, Linux October 1991...
I don't think that's true and even if it were, it doesn't seem particularly relevant.
> Bugzilla has many great enhancements and feature requests yet to be implemented, some can not coexist due to the conflicting nature of the requests.
Bugzilla has nothing to do with this. In order to justify the existence of a fork with that sort of argument you show some feature that
- cannot be implemented in LibreOffice because of technical reasons, or the direction the project is meant to take, or maintainability concerns etc.
- can be implemented in AOO in principle as the reason doesn't apply there
- can be implemented in practice, i. e. there's somebody willing to do the work
Sometimes that is the case, see for instance the fork of DragonFlyBSD from FreeBSD. But for AOO I haven't seen any such reason. Please name one if you can or just admit that your argument doesn't apply.
> "Variety's the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavor." - William Cowper
Again, just because some variety is nicer than none doesn't mean that more variety is better still. There's a sweet spot. Please argue why you think we haven't exceeded it yet.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 13:57 UTC (Tue) by SukSuk (guest, #110996) [Link]
Sweet spot?
Look at the current M$ office market share... plenty of growth potential for AOO *and* LO *and* Calligra *and* Gnome *and* even more new office suits.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 7, 2016 22:54 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
Simply asserting that doesn't make it true.
> There are a lot of open issues to be implemented in the future. Issue A may request a certain GUI, issue B a different GUI...
Yes, so what? Again, here's the list of criteria for some feature F that would justify a fork:
- it must be impossible to implement in LibreOffice, be it for technical or social or some other reason. Otherwise, it's clearly best to simply implement it there and be done with it, since you'll otherwise end up with dozens of office suites, each of which implements a different subset of the features any given user needs
- it must be implementable in Apache OpenOffice in theory as well as practice. Otherwise both alternatives won't have it, making neither product better in that respect
If you cannot name such a feature, you failed to apply your argument to the situation at hand. And in fact, the only feature meaningful feature that AOO ever brought to the table, the sidebar, was rapidly ported to LO, making AOO redundant. That alone proves your argument doesn't fly *at all*.
> Look at the current M$ office market share...
The numbers alone don't mean *anything at all* as long as they're not accompanied by a theory as to why they are the way they are. In fact, it's easy to argue the other way around: MS's market share clearly indicates that interoperability issues, thin spreading of developer resources etc. have left the open source office suites unable to compete, thus resulting in a monopoly of MS Office. Now I'm not saying that's actually the case, but you'll have to provide some sort of argument as to why this assessment of the situation is so much more likely to be wrong than your's if you want to be taken seriously.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 10:02 UTC (Thu) by SukSuk (guest, #110996) [Link]
The Sidebar IMHO is a bad feature that should have stayed in Lotus Symphony. It is a shame that LO also chose to implement it. There is no point in having two similar office suites. Each suite should aim to be unique instead of being yet another clone.
I agree, no chance for OOo and LO to break the glass ceiling as long as M$ is a platinum sponsor to ASF and Google is advisory board member in TDF.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 20:43 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
I'm not asking for an example in Bugzilla, your argument may well apply there. Or maybe not, but either way, it's beside the point, I'm asking for an example in LibreOffice. And notice that lack of a sidebar is *not* a feature. If you don't like it, turn it off in the View menu. It's that simple.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 23:15 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]
1. More products = More competition = More innovation.
Before competition and innovation can do their work, you have to have products that are reasonably complete and capable of competing, which requires they have adequate resources. If there are barely enough developers to develop one product, dividing them up in the spirit of encouraging innovation will just result in a bunch of incomplete, inadequate projects, not healthy competition.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 22:19 UTC (Sat) by bunk (subscriber, #44933) [Link]
Your suggestion to turn AOO into a framework or library in the linked mailing list discussion ends with the following:
> With these 2 changes, as obvious olive branches, I think we will see all players in the OO development eco-system be willing contributors to the new project. And this will give the new project a new lease on life.
If the only way to give AOO a new lease on life would be LO developers joining it, then AOO would definitely be dead.
No matter what you do, the LO developers won't come to rescue AOO.
What advantages does AOO have compared to LO, and for whom?
The main advantage of AOO over LO you state is:
> Even if AOO had not done 1 single release, the donation of the codebase *and the relicensing of said codebase to the ALv2* has been a *significant* plus to the open office ecosystem. This has allowed the other players in the game to have true IP provenance, as well as the ability to relicense things
Who are the other players in the game, in your ecosystem, today?
If LO would be the only other player in your ecosystem today, that would prove that your thoughts regarding the benefits of the ALv2 license compared to the licensing of LO would not be as relevant as you thought. In that case it would also be hard to see any benefits in AOO not being retired.
If there are other players in the AOO ecosystem who prefer AOO over LO for licensing reasons, they are the ones you have to talk to. If companies in the AOO ecosystem do not want to use LO for IP provenance and licensing reasons, it should be easy for you to convince them to join forces and sponsor the development work required to give AOO a new lease on life.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 22:44 UTC (Sat) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 23:09 UTC (Sat) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]
Speak for yourself please, and best not in a forum which values politeness and civilized behavior. It is language like this which would make me feel offended, belittled, angry, stubborn and uncompromising if I were part of AOO.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 3, 2016 23:17 UTC (Sat) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]
I appreciate it's strongly worded, but I really don't think it's an inaccurate assessment of the overwhelming and prevailing attitude from the free software community, with excellent and deeply-backed reason. It was a bad idea from day one, it was born of spite, its public relations were jawdroppingly toxic, and now it's squatting its one useful asset literally unable to build itself. AOO was never a good idea, and plenty of people other than me said so from the first moment.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 0:00 UTC (Sun) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
Let's further examine that. You are stating, quite openly, that your belief is that everyone hates AOO and wants it to die. It can be implied that they would do anything to help make it die. There is more than sufficient evidence out there that if someone wanted to believe that, they would be convinced of its truth.
Now imagine you are an AOO developer. As with most FOSS developers the project(s) you work on are important to you. You are personally involved with them. They are your "baby." You are then told that the world hates your baby, for no other reason than its yours and not theirs (or because your baby's father stood them up at the alter and went ahead and married you). In any case, the hate is, basically, somewhat unreasonable, but palpable. They want your baby to die.
What would *your* reaction be? Would it be to "defend" your baby? With this world-view, it is really unreasonable that some people would go overboard and troll and basically "return the favor"? Which, of course, is then used by "the other side" to show how really nasty and ugly your baby is.
I invite everyone to take a step back and actually *think* about this. Honestly think about it. And then to let me know if anyone remains surprised that things have turned out the way they have.
Some say that AOO is an embarrassment to Apache. I say this whole debacle is an embarrassment to the whole FOSS community. FOSS-haters are partying with joy at our stupidity and our hubris. And by "our" I mean ALL of us.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 2:28 UTC (Sun) by bunk (subscriber, #44933) [Link]
I say this is just a normal project fork with people on both sides saying less-than-friendly things about each other.
Bringing LO and AOO closer together again is clearly not possible in the forseeable future, but I do not see any "debacle" or "embarrassment" - so far I have seen nothing in the LO/AOO splt that would make it worse than the average FOSS fork.
> FOSS-haters are partying with joy at our stupidity and our hubris. And by "our" I mean ALL of us.
FOSS-haters are waiting to see whether hatred will let the ASF make unwise decisions regarding one of the most valuable assets in the FOSS world - the OpenOffice domain and trademark.
If there will ever be a decision that AOO will stop providing an office suite for end-users, then please transfer these assets to LO so that there will not be any confusion among OO users regarding the status of OO.
A lot of people have worked hard on trying to convince various users, companies and governments to use OO on Windows or even Linux desktops. The difference between the headlines "OO is dead" and "OO maintainership transferred to LO" can easily be millions of users - just imagine what might happen when someone tells a manager that he should migrate from OO to MS Office quickly because development of OO has officially ended and there will not even be security updates.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 5:58 UTC (Sun) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]
(I agree with your other points, though. Bashing people for backing the wrong project is not useful or productive. I don't hate AOO. I just want to see the poor thing put out of its misery, because it's painful to watch at this point. Also, *in its current state*, I believe it is actively damaging a useful brand.)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 12:31 UTC (Sun) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
We in the FOSS community tend to think that. The reality of the situation is the opposite. There are still large, large segments of the IT/SW community that don't understand FOSS, dislike FOSS, distrust FOSS and, yes, hate FOSS.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 20:20 UTC (Sun) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]
> don't understand FOSS, dislike FOSS, distrust FOSS and, yes, hate FOSS.
People who don't understand FOSS are not celebrating. Most of them don't care. Many of them use FOSS anyway: Android, Apache, Firefox, Perl, Python, MySQL, Audacity, etc.
Most dislikers are not celebrating. Most of them dislike *current offerings*, not the concept. MS Office and MS SQL do what they need better than FOSS offerings. Or seem to. A fairly large percentage of them would happily switch if that were no longer true.
Distrusters? I can't think of any reason they'd be celebrating the squabbles. At most, I'd expect them to mutter "typical" under their breath.
The only people cheering are the *actual* haters, and they're now such a tiny minority, and so obviously crazy that I refuse to pay any attention to them or factor them into my behavior at all. Heck, even *Microsoft* has done a 180 on FOSS, and is now happily supporting and endorsing it to a limited extent. The world has changed a *lot* in the last five or ten years!
And if squabbles are so bad, why didn't AOO muzzle Rob Weir ages ago? Or issue disclaimers saying "Rob does not speak for AOO"? The man was a walking squabble. :p ;)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 20:34 UTC (Sun) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 20:48 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
Just out of interest, is there some kind of “worst of Rob Weir”? It seems like everybody loves to hate him, yet I can't seem to find most of his worst trolling. The only thing I recall is his bragging about the sidebar while questioning the usefulness of Meeks' new build system…
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 22:00 UTC (Sun) by FLHerne (guest, #105373) [Link]
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2012/
http://www.robweir.com/blog/category/fud
Particularly:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/06/apache-openoffice.htm...
"Did we continue talking with TDF after it became clear that they were not willing to consider moving to any non-copyleft foundation? No, of course not.
[...] the self-appointed, unelected TDF Steering Committee remains self-appointed and unelected even if they have self-authored bylaws, unapproved by the general membership that say that they might have an election after a year.
[...] The LO fork was more the culmination of a multi-year fight between Novell and Sun/Oracle than anything else."
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/06/openoffice-libreoffic...
"So it was disappointing to witness a small but vocal minority of non-Apache members who disagreed with the proposal and who attempted to derail it. The day closed minded open source advocates decide to smother a new project in its crib, because they personally favor a different project, is the day that FOSS dies."
"Apache OpenOffice, with its permissive license, is an excellent basis now for open source as well as mixed source business models, business models that drive investment back into the ecosystem. The mixed source segment will grow the most, I believe."
"I don’t put any credence in activity-based metrics, like patches, since one can create an enormous amount of code activity by “cleaning up” the code, without having an impact that would increasing a project’s user base."
"It is not my place to take sides in a dispute between a self-appointed, unelected TDF spokesperson and a self-appointed, unelected TDF Steering Committee member. This is something you should resolve on the TDF list, I think, to ensure that your public image is less fragmented." (note the absence of any such dispute).
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 22:17 UTC (Sun) by FLHerne (guest, #105373) [Link]
https://lwn.net/Articles/550075/
https://lwn.net/Articles/532665/
https://lwn.net/Articles/522739/
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/lib...
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 9:20 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/06/apache-openoffice.htm...
(Rahul's reply gives some wider context: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/06/apache-openoffice.htm... )
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 9:27 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 18:01 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Then when they seemed to embrace the role, everyone lost their sympathy for them.
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 5, 2016 19:43 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
For the avoidance of doubt: this really is not the case.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 7:26 UTC (Sun) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
I thought it would be obvious. Calling for the death of a baby is a crime in many countries (hopefully). Calling for the death of a project is not.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 7:41 UTC (Sun) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]
Don't pretend stupidity here. Contributors do get emotionally attached to their projects, in fact that is often one of the differences between FOSS and regular proprietary dayjobs. It is a great incentive to get things working "the right way" rather then only to just get hem working.
In more than 1 interview have I heard FOSS developers talk about "their baby" and their responsibility and moral obligation to care about "their" mental baby. Ignoring this means to ignore the core of the problems here which are social/emotional.
Social identification, Trust, and differing worldviews of what constitutes " freeness" are what make a simple fork a difficult dilemma to overcome.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 12:28 UTC (Sun) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 15:51 UTC (Sun) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
And that's not in some bad analogy cases, this tend to always be the case. But magically, people don't realize nothing was demonstrated.
Analogy are OK the first or second sentence. the more you uild upon them (in the OP's case, that's four complete *paragraphs*) the more the reasoning gets disconnected from the real subject.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 4, 2016 16:09 UTC (Sun) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
"Analogies are never useful nor relevant." ?? I have no idea how you can honestly justify that statement.
You ignore the meaning of the post by simply resorting to "that's a stupid analogy". The fact is that in many, many ways the analogy is apt.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 10:47 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Others pointing out that disconnect between the analogy and the actuality is therefore quite valid.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 8:57 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
> are important to you. You are personally involved with them. They are your "baby." You are then
> told that the world hates your baby, for no other reason than its yours and not theirs (or because
> your baby's father stood them up at the alter and went ahead and married you). In any case, the
> hate is, basically, somewhat unreasonable, but palpable. They want your baby to die.
> What would *your* reaction be? Would it be to "defend" your baby?
Now imagine you are a OO.o third party contributor.
You've tolled for years to try to help OO.o, in spite of SUN's condescension, bureaucratic hell, and attempts to use the project to promote other agendas (Java-ization of a C++ codebase for example). You've helped fix problems SUN couldn't be bothered with, translated to locales SUN ignored, mounted parallel OO.o organizations to fill in SUN organizational failures, or made platforms SUN didn't care about viable. When SUN crashed you've joined the efforts to build a new home to your baby. You've tried to be inclusive by pre-emptively dual-licensing your code under a license no one really cared about but was perceived to be corp-friendly (MPL).
After months of efforts all this work is on the verge of being finalized, your baby is saved.
Now out of the blue an entity that never contributed a line of code (IBM) announces it's taking over from SUN, decides on a new license, a new home, resurrects the bureaucracy you've just gotten rid of, summarily dismisses all your work, claims credit to the whole OO.o history and would you be so kind as to redo your patches again for free under *their* project label?
As a bonus it's sacking all the old SUN OO.o devs, which were the only thing that made SUN OO.o stewardship bearable in the first place. And names a project head that thinks the road to success is to savage *your* efforts, the effort of the people you most respect (the guys that did stay during the hard slow OO.o death months), and turns the new "development" mailing list in a form of marketing forum. And poisons against you the few people he manages to recruit from the start up (go read the AOO dev mailing list archive, it is public, you'll be hard pressed to see anything related to software development in most of the exchanges).
What would *your* reaction be? Would *you* help the AOO merry band?
(In this light, the TDF heads were incredibly mature and restrained in mostly ignoring AOO instead of venting some very natural sentiments).
The *only* thing that could have salvaged the situation would have been a massive infusion of new contributors. Just like the *only* thing that made SUN OO.o abuses bearable was the dev team SUN paid.
But this would not come from IBM (after all, it was getting rid of this particular dev team).
(It's quite funny how AOO people complain old OO.o devs are getting recruited by LO-supporting entities. Those are not cheating on TDF's part. They pretty much mean LO people get the point of an healthy software project, and AOO — not).
*That's* the responsibility the Apache board picked up in letting AOO establish itself as a competing project. Recruit a dev team that would make the project viable, and balance the massive amount of ill-will they were knowingly generating with some positive contributions.
And guess what? They failed. And it was a 100% Apache board failure. Not an IBM one — IBM had announced the limits of its involvement from the start up, and pretty much kept to them.
The only thing that remains is a few AOO contributors that see their house crumbling around them, and can not imagine joining the org where most of the action is, after years of hostile demeaning brainwashing by the AOO leadership (which is long gone, BTW).
What a waste.
Some thoughts on this discussion
Posted Sep 4, 2016 17:31 UTC (Sun) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
So the conversation here has taken a turn toward anger and recriminations. That is perhaps unsurprising, but it's nonetheless unwelcome. Could I suggest a couple of things?
- For all of the heat in the comments, it's my observation that relatively few of them come from actual OpenOffice or LibreOffice developers. What we are seeing is the residual anger felt by people at varying distances to the projects involved. We may thus be seeing a picture that gives a false impression of the anger that remains in the projects themselves. Such an impression could get in the way of progress.
- Mistakes were made, nobody was perfect, it would be nice if many things had been done differently. But rehashing all of that will not really help the next step; perhaps it's not something we actually need to be doing now?
Rather than grumble about things done years ago, it might be better to think constructively about what the two projects can do now. There may be an opportunity to make things a lot better; it would be a shame to waste it because we're angry about what happened back then.
Some thoughts on this discussion
Posted Sep 5, 2016 14:36 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Some thoughts on this discussion
Posted Sep 5, 2016 14:37 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Some thoughts on this discussion
Posted Sep 6, 2016 9:24 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
They are doing a serious disservice to those guys by continuing to brandish grandiose aims the project is plainly lacking the resources to accomplish. Any wind-down that does not involve handover to TDF and onboarding of AOO people TDF side will only end up with more victims. Those people deserve better than being sold another fantasy.
Slow death is not a gift.
Some thoughts on this discussion
Posted Sep 6, 2016 16:56 UTC (Tue) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link]
However, the skillset of most of them was not readily usable for an office suite.
A "recruitement" mailing list was created but no messages have been sent there either.
I think they are still cashing in on the recognition of the "OpenOffice" name
and will continue until the name becomes worthless.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 3:43 UTC (Tue) by Brendamc@Brendamc.Com (guest, #111037) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 11:32 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Short summary: LibreOffice is the new name for OpenOffice; tell all your friends!
(And the Apache Software Foundation, if it is to preserve what is left of its reputation, should make sure that the OpenOffice name and assets are used to help people like the above commenter find their way to a properly-maintained Free Software office suite. The ASF may be the preferred recipient of gifts thrown over the corporate wall, but letting this one fall on the ground will have negative effects that surely do not need to be explained again.)
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 14:19 UTC (Tue) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
Thanks to all!
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 15:58 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Seriously! While I suspect most LO devs will simply carry on with their lives and carry on ignoring AOO, if you really have got a load more people who are prepared to work on and improve AOO, then great!!!
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 6, 2016 16:16 UTC (Tue) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link]
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 6, 2016 17:16 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Walking ghost phase is what medics call the period when a person has recovered from initial ill effects of a very large radiation dose, but before the longer term (inevitably fatal) effects kick in. The patient feels fine, they're in no pain, they have no nausea, they may be very sceptical of any claim that they're even in danger, let alone dying. They will die though, in a few hours or days.
I urge you, or the Apache board generally, to look at the facts, and not get yourself into the mess of trusting AOO project members' gut instinct that everything is fine or that the board's oversight is the problem and you should just stop looking. For sure, it is possible that they'll actually manage to turn this around. But there are already AOO people convinced they've done it, and there were six months ago, when in fact as you know they were in deep trouble already. Their feelings about this aren't going to be objective. If in say, three months, there's no measurable evidence that AOO is back on course then regardless of what is said by the handful of AOO people, retirement is the right choice.
For example, shipping AOO 4.2 in 10 weeks at ApacheConEU. That's not crazy. Libreoffice goes from feature freeze to release in 10 weeks. A healthy AOO development community should be able to do it, or come so close as to leave no-one in any doubt.
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 6, 2016 18:55 UTC (Tue) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]
...which would still leave a 13 month period from when the vulnerability was privately reported, up to when users who download the latest version would not be vulnerable to "possible execution of arbitrary code" (triggered by simply opening a document, of a type that's commonly shared online); and a 4 month period from when it was publicly disclosed.
AOO has a lot of users. Even waiting 10 weeks from today will mean another ~7 million downloads of the known-vulnerable version (on top of the ~30 million who already downloaded it), which seems remarkably negligent.
And as mentioned in https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/84695405b626d58b2efd... , AOO already had one chance to learn from its mistakes, when it took 6 months to fix another "possible execution of arbitrary code" bug after public disclosure. Now the same situation occurred again, and it was handled just as poorly.
I think all the discussion about the history of AOO/LO and recruitment etc is a distraction from the problem that Apache is still shipping vulnerable software to millions of people, and still has no concrete plans to fix it any time soon, and AOO has demonstrated a consistent inability to fix it - surely that can't be allowed to continue for yet another few months? It needs urgent action.
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 6, 2016 20:13 UTC (Tue) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
I agree. I would even go a bit against the flow, and say that the main problem they have is not the lack of manpower. From what I've seen, the problem they have, instead, is a failure of procedure: every single build is a laborious manual process, involving several developers.
In my opinion as someone looking from the outside, for they to get out of the hole they are in, they have to:
* Be able to, with zero prior notice, produce from scratch in 24 hours or less a fully installable package for all the major architectures (including at least Windows, Mac, and one Linux distribution) and locales (including at least English), from all their currently supported stable branches;
* Since their bureaucracy requires so, enough developers should be able to in 24 hours or less reproduce locally the build for all major architectures and locales, using the source code used for the builds in the previous step, for their +1 voting.
That leaves enough time for the QA and release process, and possibly repeating the build if the QA fails for some reason.
That is, their stable branches, and as much as possible the trunk branch, should be kept in a "ready to release" condition at all times, and they should have known working development environments ready to compile these branches at all times.
If every time they have a security fix, they have to find a developer with a Mac and/or Windows machine, install the development environment, start a build, ask in the mailing list why it failed in the middle of the compilation, install the missing packages, ask in the mailing list why it failed again in the middle of the compilation, find out it was a known compiler bug in the exact version of gcc which happened to be used this time, find out it failed again because a particular build directory wasn't removed, clean it manually and start the build again, ... That shouldn't happen!
They should be able to say with certainty "we have the development environments ready, if we start a build from a clean checkout, we are *guaranteed* to have a working package after 12 hours of compilation".
Of course, that only plugs the leak. For them to be able to get new developers, IMHO the "new developer" experience should be better. That is, when a new developer comes, they should be able to say "follow this *short* list of steps, leave the compiler running overnight, and you'll have a working AOO to play with". No stopping in the middle of the build because a required package was missing (check at the start). No fiddly configuration bits which will break the build because the correct parameter wasn't chosen. Make it too hard, and the volunteer will give up before they even begin.
Even then, however, I don't see a future for AOO. The path forward is clear: they have to do a long-delayed cleanup of their code base. The problem, however, is that every single cleanup they have to do, has already been done in LO; whoever does the cleanup will be duplicating work, and will be duplicating work for years, which is very demotivating. AOO has no compelling advantage over LO other than the trademark and perhaps the different license, so most developers who have heard of both will prefer to work on LO instead.
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 7, 2016 8:07 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
This seems unrealistic, last time I checked building LO took 47 hours and I expect the same for AOO.
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 7, 2016 9:03 UTC (Wed) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]
Looking at recent Fedora build of libreoffice-5.2.1.2-2.fc26:
Started Tue, 06 Sep 2016 14:45:19 UTC
Completed Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:09:40 UTC
Less than 18 hours.
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 7, 2016 10:34 UTC (Wed) by FLHerne (guest, #105373) [Link]
Still, I agree with the general point - if you can't *start* a build within 24 hours and be confident in its success, you have a problem.
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 7, 2016 12:30 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 7, 2016 12:48 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 7, 2016 12:58 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 7, 2016 20:11 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
:-)
As someone who follows these things on the LO dev list, I agree with the poster who said it takes ages ...
I don't know the details, but iirc the main Windows build machine is an 8-core Opteron monster (it may well have been upgraded by now), and it takes a couple of days to build following a "make clean".
Anyways, the general comments are that Windows takes a LOT longer than nix, and my Athlon X-III (with 16GB ram) takes overnight to do a clean build on gentoo.
Cheers,
Wol
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 7, 2016 20:23 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 7, 2016 22:32 UTC (Wed) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link]
ci build for windows, takes about 27 to 29 minutes.
the ci system is handling build on the 3 platform + a clang + plugin build for all incomming patch in gerrit.. and the slowest build is when the slave that get assigned for mac is one of the mac mini, which can take up to 1h40.
linux build time is much more variable depending on ccache hits rate. it range from 10 to 40 minutes...
a release build for mac, on a mac mini, building with all 100+ localization and signing, take about 3 hours.
between the 2 overlapping branches supported and the rc, the release train averages to one release per week. (these are on top of ci-build)
on top of all that there is also boxes that build what be call 'bibibisect' these build every commit of master and put the resulting binary in a git repo so that qa can do bisection on binaries. These bibisect repo, which we make one per 'epoch', which is about every 6 months worth of commit.. end-up containing 10-12K binary versions of the product for a weight of 8-12GB
even the daily clang+ubsan build takes 'only' about 6-7 hours
Walking ghost
Posted Sep 8, 2016 12:18 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
So all that cleanup work has been well worth it!!! :-)
Cheers,
Wol
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 7, 2016 8:18 UTC (Wed) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
Please, please, please. With lots of cream and sugar on top. For the sake of all of us. Transfer whatever IP/trademark/domains you can to TDF/LO as soon as possible. The whole AOO tragedy is arguable among the top three factors blocking an open source desktop from succeeding the last five years. That is why we are frustrated, and some of us boil over. It is the kind of schism none of us needs. I believe permissive licensing has it's place, but by now it should be obvious to everybody that office suites is not the place. Maybe ten or so years from now, but certainly not now.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 7, 2016 10:57 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]
All the major Linux distribution have been shipping LO pretty much from the get go which has been better maintained and thus better choice for open source desktop.
Arguably at this point in time ( if it ever had an opportunity to do so ) open source desktop will never succeed since
a) They dont have the financial and marketing backing to compete with likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google
b) Their UI is too unstable to be used by novice end users
c) The distributions that those desktop environment run on top of are too fragmented which makes it impossible to properly integrated it into the OS stack, support it and develop applications for it.
e) All the effort has been too little to late these 20 years or so they have had to properly develop one so since the world is evolving away from the traditional desktop as we grew up with and know it.
I would say open source desktop environments will never succeed beyond being anything more than like minded people creating desktop environment to satisfy their own need to create one and the open source community to run one for the sake of it being open source ( idealism ) but I'm happy to be proven wrong thou I think that's highly unlikely since the desktop environments have been doing this for close to twenty years now without any remote signs of success compared to the other desktop enviroments and their OS on the market.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 7, 2016 12:54 UTC (Wed) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
Then you cannot have spent much time on the front lines. Microsoft Office (together with specialized software and device drivers) has been the main barriers of entry for the desktop. For free software companies, the first natural target was replacing the office suite. Then (if successful) you could start looking into the full desktop. Problem is, everybody thinks of openoffice because of brand recognition, so their (those who are using alternative desktops) experience and perception is from AOO. That makes it very much an uphill battle, or more accurately a lost battle. Redirecting all those kicking the tires of open source office suites to up-to-date libreoffice would be a very important step forward for everybody who wants to see open source prevail.
Whether an open source desktop will succeed or not is another discussion, but it seems Google already has done it with Chromebooks. Of course, they needed a competitive office suite first, namely Google docs. I would even claim that was the hardest part of it.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 7, 2016 23:00 UTC (Wed) by lenov (guest, #15428) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 9, 2016 15:40 UTC (Fri) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link]
>
> Thanks to all!
Here are the list archives of the "recruitement" Apache OpenOffice mailing list,
https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/openoffice-recr...
There is not a single contributor yet.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 7, 2016 6:45 UTC (Wed) by gstein (guest, #3612) [Link]
The Foundation has very little input (by design) into how the AOO community runs its project. Or any other ASF project/community, for that matter. The Foundation provides a space for its various communities to operate. To thrive or to fail. To expand or to diminish. The outcome is up to the community.
In the comments, I've seen quite a few people admonish the ASF for incorporating the AOO community under its umbrella. I've seen comments that the Foundation (and its Board) have done this/that to create failure in the FOSS community. And comments about how AOO is demonstrating that the ASF model of communities is a failure. ... That for whatever reason stated, the ASF is the boogeyman in this conversation.
I would like to point those naysayers to the Apache HTTPD Server, which still serves over 50% of the websites on this planet. Or how most Java programmers turn to Apache for its Commons libraries. Or to our projects in the Big Data space that have created a multi-BILLION dollar industry. Apache defined Big Data, with the introduction of Apache Hadoop. Or ... (need I go on?)
Please feel free to comment upon the AOO community (and LO), and their problems. And, hey, if you believe that the ASF has a problem with its model, then feel free (tho it is off-topic for this article). But please stop conflating the two things.
Thanks.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 7, 2016 7:37 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]
How many of the successful projects within ASF's broader community where corporate handouts and how many are project that grew from within it?
And was not the Apache HTTPd successful before the creation of ASF ( which was btw created after it came about ) if you look at the timeline
NCSA HTTPd <---> Apache HTTPd ---> Apache Group ---> Apache Software Foundation
So arguably the ncsa fork is not the best sample to be used here.
1. http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/statements-on-op...
The Apache Way
Posted Sep 7, 2016 9:21 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
This post seems either confused or insincere. Choosing to do nothing is not the same thing as having no power to do anything.
The codebase that is now AOO, plus the OpenOffice.org site and marks were all given to Apache. Not to some hypothetical Apache OpenOffice community that didn't exist yet. More than once in this conversation thread something has been made of the fact that Apache Software Foundation formally existed as a corporate entity, whereas TDF didn't until 2012. But AOO doesn't formally exist either.
Far from being - as your post seems to be suggesting - merely an umbrella under which any community may seek shelter, Apache actually does have a whole bunch of rules for how these communities are obliged to operate, beginning with a rather bureaucratic process by which they are brought under the umbrella in the first place. You weren't obliged to create AOO, and you aren't obliged to allow it to continue. Perhaps if you are particularly blinkered it might feel as if the whole world operates by Apache's rules, but it does not. You are not operating some analog of Sourceforge or Github, but instead even as Apache insists it doesn't demand "technical" control over the direction of each project it actually has great power though insistence on "The Apache Way", if it so wishes.
One of the items in The Apache Way is "security as a mandatory feature". AOO haven't really delivered on this since 2015, and as of today still are falling down on this badly. Perhaps it is a symptom of AOO just not having enough manpower for a project of this size. But that was also, in the view of many here (but perhaps not your fellow board members) a likely or even inevitable consequences of creating AOO when LibreOffice already existed and had the _developer_ mindshare. What is the _Apache_ board going to do about it?
Another item from The Apache Way is "respectful, honest, technical-based interaction". Historically AOO mostly "interacted" with the outside world through Rob Weir. Whose job was it to ensure AOO followed the Apache Way during that period ? Presumably that's on the board once again. What did you do to rein Rob in? You don't have to get into specifics, but if you find the answer is "Nothing" I suggest that reflects on the Apache board, not on the communities that now associate Apache's name with rude people who never give a straight answer.
This is about you, even if you wish it wasn't.
The Apache Way
Posted Sep 8, 2016 2:03 UTC (Thu) by gstein (guest, #3612) [Link]
Yup. That's me.
> But AOO doesn't formally exist either.
As a community it certainly does. The ASF is the corporate entity used to hold the community's intellectual property (specifically, the trademarks; I don't think the copyrights were transferred). The community and the corporation are separate. I just saw people getting confused by that. By your remarks, you clearly are not one of those, and you recognize how the Board provides some oversight for the community.
But the Board does not insert itself into the operation of the community. Even when they shoot themselves in the foot (eg. Rob Weir). *You* may want us to be more involved, but that is not how the Board/Foundation has chosen to operate in its 17 years of life. We don't believe it is our role to interfere, but instead to provide the legal framework, the basic rules of operation, some infrastructure, and help with (eg.) press and trademarks.
In any case ... the debate isn't about how the Foundation operates. Or at least I don't care to participate in that debate. I was responding to people misunderstanding that the AOO community is somehow "The Apache Software Foundation".
Re: security ... Of course that is a problem. That is the primary reason that the Board *has* stepped in, and pushed on the PMC to fix itself or close shop.
Why did we accept AOO? I ask, why not? You say "cuz somebody was doing better". That isn't our decision to make. What *we* saw was a codebase, some trademarks, and a small community that believed they could be successful. So we gave them a home. You can disagree with the choice, but I don't think it was inherently wrong. Many communities come to the ASF, asking to be part of our umbrella of communities. Why should we judge them, and turn them away?
The Board does not police the communities. That just doesn't scale, and it isn't the role of the Foundation anyways. The PMCs and their communities should be self-policing, per our guidelines (the Apache Way is the shorthand name). We worked with the AOO PMC for a long long time to get them to "fix" Rob, and for a while there, he was better. But I'm not gonna worry about the past. He's long gone.
The question is for the AOO community to decide what to do. They may ask the Board to close up their project, but we aren't going to make that choice for them.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 7, 2016 11:48 UTC (Wed) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link]
Not any more. The market share of the Apache HTTPD Server for developer websites is continuously dropping and at the moment is down to 30%.
Between July 2016 and August 2016, the drop was a big 5.7%.
In the top 1 million websites (the important ones), Apache still has a market share of 43%, however it has been steadily dropping since 2010 with no sign of recovery.
In contrast, nginx is what is being used for top websites. The use of nginx is increasing at a faster pace and currently is at 28%.
The Apache HTTPD Server is was is described as "legacy", losing market share from new software that is better designed.
Source: https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2016/08/24/august-2016...
> Please feel free to comment upon the AOO community (and LO), and their problems. And, hey, if you believe that the ASF has a problem with its model, then feel free (tho it is off-topic for this article). But please stop conflating the two things.
The Apache Software Foundation has been taken for a ride when they accepted "OpenOffice.org". There was no other similar type of software (office suite that deals with end-users instead of server software) in the ASF, and the ASF did not have such experience.
The processes of the ASF are not suitable for such software.
It looks like the decision where OOo ends up with, was "anything other than The Document Foundation").
What is feeding the remaining people in Apache OpenOffice, is their personal hatred for LibreOffice.
This is a mess specifically for the Apache Software Foundation to deal with.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 2:10 UTC (Thu) by gstein (guest, #3612) [Link]
Yeah, I knew that Apache httpd has been dropping due to nginx. Last I had checked, we were still at about 53%, but yup, I see it is now low-40s. Thanks for the update.
> There was no other similar type of software (office suite that deals with end-users instead of server software) in the ASF, and the ASF did not have such experience.
I don't believe that. We deal with communities, not types of projects. We never had a database ... until Apache Derby. We never had a language ... until Apache Groovy. We never had a Big Data project ... until Apache Hadoop CREATED the whole concept of Big Data.
--
The AOO community needs to figure out what it wants to do. The Foundation will give them that space. We'll intervene if and when we find the community is no longer working on the problem.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 4:32 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]
Do you have any statistics showing that after projects have joined the ASF umbrella that they have become more successful and community surrounding them have grown stronger in terms of end user base and development power?
And since you mentioned Groovy how healthy was it for the project ( and it's sub projects ) having to move from github, the largest development base on the planet into Apache's own Git repository?
And on general note of all the projects in ASF how many are bit rotting and how many are succeeding?
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 5:27 UTC (Thu) by gstein (guest, #3612) [Link]
My intention with the "Apache name dropping" is that (IMO) the Foundation is creating a space for some great work that helps the F/OSS world and the software industry at large. It is not evil overlord that some commentators in this thread have implied. This also goes to my point about avoiding conflation between the AOO community, and the work of the Foundation (eg. people may be assigning various blame to the Foundation where it should rightly be placed upon the AOO community).
Mind you, I'm not here to throw AOO under the bus :-P ... I think the Foundation did exactly what it was built to do: foster communities that were interested in coming under its umbrella. And so we accepted AOO as one of the many projects of the Foundation. We all had high hopes for it, and maybe it will solve its current problems, and figure out a forward path.
I'm not going to dig up statistics for you. You can do that just as easily, on your own time. But let's stick to Apache Hadoop. Nobody used the term "Big Data" because the code to enable those processes was not *available* to them. Then Yahoo donated the codebase to the ASF, and Apache Hadoop was created. THEN people had access and the Big Data revolution began. (agreed that I misspoke: Apache Hadoop didn't create the *concept*, merely the basis for the *term* Big Data)
So from some internal code at Yahoo to a multi-billion dollar Big Data industry? Yeah. I'd say that is more successful. From a no-community engineering team, to a multi-national pool of contributors ... again: a huge win in community and development.
Pah. I'm gonna stop now. You're trolling. This LWN article is about AOO. I don't need to defend the Foundation and its projects, to you. You can choose whether you like the ASF. I choose to believe it is beneficial for the planet and the software industry.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 5:56 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]
I'm not surprised of the rift between Apache Foundation and the rest of the world is as it is if their world view is like that.
And fyi this is about AOO and ASF not taking responsibility and resolving the situation that has been going on for past 5 years since clearly the AOO community has not been able to take care of it itself.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 7:07 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
Actually, it depends on where you get the statistics from. If you go by W3Techs, Apache is still in the fifties:
https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all
I believe Netcraft has a bias in its data, so at least I don't trust them more.
Thanks for providing the ASF. It is the best effort on this planet to provide a breeding ground for permissively licensed software. Personally I am thrilled to see how ALv2.0 prevails over alternative permissive licenses (even with the resistance of some well-known software houses). I believe you have all the right motives, and I wish you all the best. I hope we can put the AOO situation behind us soon.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 7:29 UTC (Thu) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 13:31 UTC (Thu) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]
>https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all
>I believe Netcraft has a bias in its data, so at least I don't trust them more.
Yeah, most other surveys show a much different picture than Netcraft
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 14:15 UTC (Thu) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link]
The general single chart that they provide is not helpful enough.
Netcraft has better free stats.
See https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2016/08/24/august-2016...
The fourth graph is about "Market share of the top million busiest sites".
It filters out any domain parking websites and websites that are not very active.
Normally the busiest websites are the oldest websites, which would favour any legacy server software that are painful to upgrade and switch.
However, the stats show a steady decline in the Apache HTTPD server.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 18:21 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
You are of course free to believe that. After following numerous statistics over the years, I have come to another conclusion. However, I am in no mood to spend hours documenting it.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 20:17 UTC (Thu) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]
Credit where credit's due: Apache httpd is still very relevant, because it's the *only* widely available web server with decent HTTP2 support in 2016. Nginx rushed their feature out crippled and incomplete so they could loudly proclaim they were the first, and lighttpd has less of a pulse than AOO.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 7, 2016 20:53 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]
And you're right, those who think the ASF was deliberately acting to harm the Free Software community are pretty clearly insane. (Although those who suspect hostility towards the *copyleft*/share-alike movement may have some reasons for suspicion.)
At the same time, the fact that the ASF has done (and is doing) lots of good things does not absolve them of responsibility for whatever mistakes they may have made and/or are making. So the recitation of ASFs good deeds is not entirely relevant here, except as evidence against any anti-free-software motives.
> The Foundation has very little input (by design) into how the AOO community runs its project.
This may be something the Foundation will want to reconsider in light of these events. Especially since, it should now be clear, people may not always clearly distinguish the behavior of the ASF from the behavior of organizations operating under its banner. If there is no official code of conduct for ASF projects, then perhaps it's time to create one. If there is one, perhaps these events will suggest ways the CoC should be expanded.
If the ASF ignores this mess and just goes on with business-as-normal, then I think they will start to deserve more of the blame. Especially if this end up happening again, with another project.
> And, hey, if you believe that the ASF has a problem with its model, then feel free (tho it is off-topic for this article).
The model of how they run their child projects is definitely *not* off-topic.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Sep 8, 2016 2:24 UTC (Thu) by gstein (guest, #3612) [Link]
Haha! Yeah, though my impression is that most OSS folks just shrug their shoulders at Free Software people. The latter tend to be more fervent because they want to ensure developers retain Rights to how code is used. The OSS folks don't really care about those Rights, so they remain unconcerned. ... But yeah, suspicions are valid :-P
And clearly the ASF as an entity only uses ALv2 because it has a specific intent and desire, to use a permissive license. But the Foundation doesn't evangelize its own position. Others can choose what works best for them.
> If the ASF ignores this mess and just goes on with business-as-normal
Oh, that won't happen. The Board is already involved, and that is never a good sign. Around the ASF, we generally describe the Board as a blunt instrument, rather than a precision scalpel. It just doesn't have the information necessary to take measured, cautious steps. So we blow up PMCs, replace Chairs, or other similar nuclear interventions. PMCs do *not* want the Board involved ... it rarely turns out well for them (in the short-term; in the long-, the interventions all worked and the new PMCs are healthy or closed).
> definitely *not* off-topic
Well, I will continue to respectfully disagree. I believe the topic here is what AOO will choose to do, moving forward. Not what happened in the past, or the relationship between AOO and the ASF.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Apr 8, 2017 9:59 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
The _optimism_ alas remains much as ever, leading to their PMC writing in October...
"Apache OpenOffice 4.1.4 is contemplated for release around year end for further maintenance and available security fixes"
and then when that had failed to materialise in January...
"Apache OpenOffice 4.1.4 is planned for release in 2017 Q1"
and presumably the next quarterly report will say now they hope it'll happen in Q2. For a point release, something LibreOffice can ship about once per month without strain.
Imagine if you were a developer who had the mistaken impression that work for AOO would be much appreciated. You create a new feature, submit it to the AOO project in, say, June 2016 and... nothing. Is that feature in 4.1.3? No, that's just fixing a security bug from a year ago, is it going to be in 4.1.4 ? No, it's only a bug-fix release, need to wait for 4.2.0 which may be years away if it ever happens. Meanwhile you see a friend's feature for LibreOffice gets into a beta, then a final release, somebody finds a bug, the bug gets fixed, that's released too...
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Apr 15, 2017 22:09 UTC (Sat) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]
It's giving me a “religious cult” vibe - they strain to never speak of the elephant in the room while they cheerfully polish the holes in the drywall. And if someone puts them in a position where they're forced to acknowledge reality (e.g. one long thread asking why there's so little user involvement), it devolves into angry defensive rants about preserving the purity of their bloodline, how LO isn't "real", etc etc. There are a few personal attacks from one person who thinks LO is an illegal venture and Rob Weir is a saint (they've obviously never read any of his comments on here), but there's an awful long chain of +1 replies to them afterwards.
Can't possibly fathom why their new recruits per year remains epsilon, with such a warm and welcoming culture... /s
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Jul 3, 2017 19:51 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
The PMC writes, after observing that they have been "waiting since some weeks" for the person notionally managing the 4.1.4 release to er, do any managing, without any trace of irony, "Apache OpenOffice 4.2.0 is planned for this year - but without to name a specific time frame" as if by power of wishful thinking "this year" isn't far too definite a time frame for the project to commit to.
These meagre resources should have been directed to winding things up in an orderly fashion, preferably years ago, but certainly by the end of 2016. Instead the Apache Software Foundation is allowing AOO to rot from the inside and its key personnel are in a state of denial.
Apache's pretty 2017 "annual report" cites Apache OpenOffice repeatedly, it doesn't mention that the project is largely moribund and nobody should be using this software because it's essentially unmaintained, instead it just keeps talking about how many people are downloading and using it, at one point asserting a value of _millions of dollars_ to the Foundation giving away this software over FY2017.
I think the belief in some circles has been that since Apache is such a "light touch" organisation, the contamination won't spread so it doesn't matter. If one, or ten or a hundred projects are allowed to rot rather than being aggressively retired once they're not viable, well, that's somebody _else's_ project, not mine, I don't care. But actually it does matter because the "Apache Way" is not really the bullet point list that the board loves to cite, but instead the actual practices of the organisation. And those practices have been allowing projects to rot and fall apart, they're going to do the exact same thing to projects you _do_ care about.
With a different hat on I care about a very different but no less famous Apache project, httpd. Apache httpd does HTTPS very poorly. When most people's HTTPS implementations were pretty crappy this didn't feel like a big deal. It's just another optional component of the httpd that's not very good, just don't use it. Put a reverse proxy in front. Or don't use HTTPS. But "don't use HTTPS" is not really a practical option in 2017 (though you wouldn't think that if you talked to Apache's own infrastructure people), and if someone is going to buy separate components to handle the HTTPS termination, you start to wonder what the HTTP server is actually _for_ in this picture, it's not talking to clients, it's not doing most of the actual work... you would think that concern about HTTPS quality would intensively exercise the Apache PMC and be the focus of much new work. You would be wrong.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Jul 5, 2017 2:10 UTC (Wed) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Jul 7, 2017 16:28 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
https://www.sba-research.org/wp-content/uploads/publicati...
As well as things that study digs into, like Ciphersuite configuration there are individual pain points that study doesn't touch on such as:
OCSP Stapling: To get from "That's a nice protocol, shame it's so impractical" to a working revocation system we need OCSP stapling. Apache notionally supports it. So you'd think we could quickly get to, say, 50% install base. But their implementation was either built by someone who understood the individual words in the specification but had no idea what the overall goal was, or it's been intentionally sabotaged to put people off. Most people who try to set this up will shoot themselves in the foot and end up just making their server needlessly unreliable. Experts, with a LOT of effort can make it sort-of more or less work. That's nowhere near good enough for a feature that other servers get right out of the box.
SNI default handling: It's all very well to implement SNI, but what in particular should happen if the client requests a name we've never heard of? By default Apache's response is to shrug and press on regardless, as it would with ordinary VHosts. This opens up a number of unpleasant surprises, which in practice we now have to put up with because Apache is so widespread, but it'd be wrong not to _point out_ that Apache played a role.
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Jul 8, 2017 23:24 UTC (Sat) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Nov 14, 2020 0:43 UTC (Sat) by allenwrench1 (guest, #143056) [Link]
Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice
Posted Nov 14, 2020 2:14 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]