It's time to let go, Apache Software Foundation
The Apache Software Foundation offers a suite of office productivity software named Apache Open Office. Based on the download page, you would never guess the last major release of the software was made available in 2014. With that bit of release history in mind, would it be fair to consider Apache O...
Fully expected a clickbait article, was pleasantly proven wrong.
Adding a summary to this: the article has some history about OpenOffice (which is a zombie project that was essentially replaced by LibreOffice after Oracle bought Sun) followed by a description of patterns of weird commit history recently (e.g. regular changes that are entirely or almost entirely just fiddling with whitespace), and a request to email the Apache foundation to ask them to make it clear that the project is dead.
The article doesn't really frame the problem apache is causing... I think it's really just that someone might install OpenOffice thinking that it's LibreOffice.
It's definitely a dick move by Apache but... the reality is that they're entitled to cling to the OpenOffice trademark if they wish, and it's really LibreOffice's branding problem.
Also the article doesn't mention the 14 bug fix releases since 4.1, which seems kinda disingenuous.
I get it that the project isn't getting work done on features, but it bothers me how the author tried to criticize basic code quality improvements such as fixing typos. I don't know if the author is an active contributor to the project, but I think he shouldn't really be criticizing the ones that actually contribute, wether their contributions are big or small.
The commit history I looked through has multiple commits for something that should realistically be a single “linted the project” commit. It’s valid criticism in this case.
The commit history I looked through has multiple commits for something that should realistically be a single “linted the project” commit. It’s valid criticism in this case.
I don't agree. The trunk features multiple typo fixes and whatnot, but they are days apart and spread over weeks on end.
If anything, this shows that no one is contributing to the project, and people like the blogger wasted more effort writing posts on how no one is doing anything while they themselves do nothing at all, and to make matters worse they criticise the ones actually contributing something.
If the blogger really feels strongly about this, he should put their money where their mouth is and lead by example.
But why care? Open source work is volunteer work. I'm not saying it is above criticism, but if truly the only people willing and wanting to work on the project want to make the commits like that as opposed to a single one, who cares? If you strongly believe in topics like this and want to work on the project then go help them out. But like I said, if the only people who actually want to work on the project want to work on it like that, then who cares?
Does Apache have incentive for the project to seem alive when it isn't? Maybe? I don't know. Do I think they're trying to make it look alive? I feel pretty strongly they aren't.
At this point, who cares when LibreOffice exists? Though I do get the potential confusion for newbies but there is so much written out there on this topic I feel like it's harder and harder to get confused on the two.
I don't see why the last major release being in 2014 is relevant. It's just document editing software. If it still works for that then I don't see the problem. This isn't some sort of video game client where all of the game servers are shut down and you can't play it.
Edit: Also, this article really buries the lede. The latest update is a security update from February of 2023. Just because it wasn't a "major" update doesn't mean it's been untouched.
I find this a weird take.
What about security patches? What about updates to document standards? What about technological advancements such as IPv6, 10bit colors, high res displays? What about bugfixes?
Software is complex and office suites are complex by software standards.
My parents got new phones and have endless hassles with photos being HEIC instead of JPEG.
Document formats are much more fucked up than image formats, at the best of times, and Microsoft almost certainly changes shit just to keep Open Office a little bit broken. This version is ten years out of date. Unless you stick to editing documents you wrote yourself - there is not a chance in hell it works the way people expect.
I really do believe most people editing documents are going to be using the same tool as everyone else. Even using stuff like Google Docs to edit docx doesn't work super well. It's definitely a nice to have feature but I really don't consider it the most important thing.
I'm also not trying to say anyone should use or even like open office. I'm mostly saying the idea of delisting it because it hasn't seen a "major" update since 2014 seems wrong.
They should open source their bot for making those white space commits. It might be handy.