Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

I&#x27;ve felt for a long time (maybe even a decade) that Apache is the place OSS goes to retire&#x2F;die. It is heartbreaking in some ways, they became the stewards for a lot of interesting projects [1]. And the venerable web server was so important to the early web. I am still running Apache vhosts on a few personal websites.<p>It is also a totally unfair characterization. I mean, they still house relevant projects including Kafka, Lucene, Zookeeper, Spark, Arrow and many others.<p>But it does feel Apache lives in a kind of stasis, a relic of the &quot;old&quot; web, like geocities sites or MySpace. If a project ends up in Apache it feels to me like it has gone out to pasture.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.apache.org&#x2F;projects.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.apache.org&#x2F;projects.html</a>

I think the history recap is somewhat incomplete.<p>I believe that the death blow which lead to the fork LibreOffice was the lack of trust in Oracle commitment to Open Office and open source in general, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.<p>Sun indeed had largely reduced its involvement in the project in the last years, and there was the &quot;Symphony incident&quot; [1]. The death blow was when Oracle arrived, started the trial with Google over Java&#x2F;Android, inherited MySQL and almost killed it, inherited OpenOffice and the future did not look bright anymore [2, in German]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20130927072255&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;443989&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20130927072255&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;A...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20131024094250&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heise.de&#x2F;open&#x2F;artikel&#x2F;Die-Woche-Bad-Company-Oracle-1130884.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20131024094250&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heise....</a>

Apache&#x27;s stubborn refusal to direct OpenOffice users towards LibreOffice has done immeasurable harm to the Apache brand and it&#x27;s basically ruined the OpenOffice brand. A great example of the damage that can be done by poor stewardship.

It looks like most of the recent commits are done by someone as mostly a way of learning and not for the sake of the project itself.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;apache&#x2F;openoffice&#x2F;commit&#x2F;d2a7b3cc90e953929c61184a7c57d4404200e51b">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;apache&#x2F;openoffice&#x2F;commit&#x2F;d2a7b3cc90e95392...</a>

Entirely unrelated, but it&#x27;s just so retro.<p>The trunk branch, the Bugzilla list, the OS&#x2F;2 support, the user forums, the multi-hour build process, the XHTML 1.0 compliant badge on the <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openoffice.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openoffice.org&#x2F;</a> homepage .....<p>Reminds me of the good old days.

1. Please don&#x27;t email-spam one of the most significant OSS orgs in the world.<p>2. What has the author done to engage so far? Has Apache responded to their emails? Have they opened any threads in chat forums?<p>3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just being minimally kept alive?

Just toss it onto <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;attic.apache.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;attic.apache.org&#x2F;</a>, link to LibreOffice and be done with it.

Okay, so we&#x27;ve known this is happening for a while. But why though?<p>First, I don&#x27;t understand what&#x27;s the ASF&#x27;s position here. Do they have some political reason to keep kicking this can down the road? Is there money on the line? Is it just somebody refusing to give up?<p>And given the licensing allows, why don&#x27;t they rebrand LibreOffice, rather than keeping a zombie of a project?<p>Or why don&#x27;t they just make some sort of deal with LibreOffice?

ASF rules require a report from the PMC at every third month. There reports are written by the Project Membership Committee, and checked by the Board. (I know that they really read them).<p>Board reports (including project reports) are open (with 1-2 month delay, they are published only after approval, at the next Board Meeting).<p>You can find the report of OpenOffice project here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whimsy.apache.org&#x2F;board&#x2F;minutes&#x2F;OpenOffice.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whimsy.apache.org&#x2F;board&#x2F;minutes&#x2F;OpenOffice.html</a><p>ps: just adding here as an additional source, I couldn&#x27;t really judge the situation...<p>ps2: BTW, I think it&#x27;s very interesting to read these project reports...

Of course everyone agrees with OP&#x27;s post. It&#x27;s been dead for a while. We&#x27;ve been trying to convince Apache leadership to kill it forever. The problem is that the ASF is fundamentally broken. It&#x27;s just a fake 501(c)(3) which actually runs like a 501(c)(6) -- which serves corporate interests, and it should be shutdown. All their projects are just about serving corporations instead of the public good, as legally required under the tax code for this organization.

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

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

&gt; we find that whitespace changes are not just part of the commits that Apache Open Office has been receiving, whitespace changes make up a substantial amount of the commits added to the repository.<p>wat.

It seems to me that Apache started out as a general software conservancy, but they have become hyperfocused on -vaguely - big data infrastructure. They have collected many useful projects (OpenOffice, Subversion, NetBeans, Maven, Groovy), but those projects are now being left to rot. Meanwhile, Apache has <i>also</i> collected a huge percentage of the big data infrastructure world (Kafka, Avro, Druid, Flume, Flink, Hive, Hadoop, HBase, Mesos, Spark, Solr, Pig, you get the idea) and those are watered and made to flourish. Not sure why they hold onto OpenOffice and Subversion with a dying grasp, but I assume it&#x27;s a lack of leadership.

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

OpenOffice is dead but who cares? ASF doesn’t really spend any funds on it, it doesn’t eat away any attention, doesn’t really fork the community because nobody really cares about ooo, at least there is something stable there. I don’t know, there are things that gets me from my chair more.<p>Like the weirdness with “libreoffice versions” forced by collabora. (I understand, collabora spends a lot of money developing libreoffice so they want some money back on support, but it is so hard to understand those versions…)<p>edit: ugh fixed the company name. sorry

Or the committer is making very small changes that are hard too see amongst the massive whitespace changes his auto-formatter makes every time she saves a<p>Latest commit:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;apache&#x2F;openoffice&#x2F;commit&#x2F;ce48dd1f26396c7ab9fed48d2df6a6b2bfcf6e06">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;apache&#x2F;openoffice&#x2F;commit&#x2F;ce48dd1f26396c7a...</a><p>Can you spot the change?<p>Just because the software doesn&#x27;t have massive changes (that nobody asked for anyway), doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s unmaintained.

I wonder what would happen if someone just bought openoffice.net and tried to get the top slot on Google for &quot;open office&quot;. Would Apache sue? Or would they be appropriately ashamed into doing nothing?

What would you suggest for a free app with all features provided by a typical office suite? One option is Libre Office, but the interface seems outdated and most times it does not have many features you might expect of an office app. Is there any other office suite app that you would suggest?

Apache is somehow very partial to Java OSS projects (56.5% seems to be the current count - probably some underlying network effects at work) so its relevance and impact follows that of the Java ecosystem. Which is not dying but it is not creating waves of excitement either.<p>But we can add the current Open Office debacle to the cumulating data points indicating that after decades of both wins and failures FOSS has cumulated both battle scars and lots of dead wood. The dead wood may just be ignored or relegated to fertilizer but it might also destroy the forest in a wildfire.<p>Developing an open source &quot;office suite&quot; that is ready for the next decade of ubiquitous ML&#x2F;AI is a highly non-trivial task and LibreOffice is not exactly trailblazing the way. It will take proactive, smart and effective collaboration by many actors to achieve this.

Office on the desktop is kinda 2014 in itself. Email and wiki replaced word. Spreadsheets are good enough. Presentations are better when simpler.<p>Perhaps not much more de is needed in desktop office tools?

I wonder if there is some process in Apache Foundations for projects to be depreciated&#x2F;wind down<p>With lack of activity in OpenOffice frankly it might be best for community if those projects join forces

ASF is where software goes to &quot;retire&quot;; but retirement in this context is an euphemism for dying.<p>truth is that the Apache Software Foundation is a software graveyard; this is known but not really &quot;seriously&quot; acknowledged.<p>going straight away from the topic: why our culture does this? so many things are like this: there&#x27;s a reality (ASF is a graveyard) but it&#x27;s like rough or impolite to be upfront about it (but nooo, it&#x27;s just &#x27;stable&#x27; software... which may be in some cases but also it also may be dead and unused, people lie)<p>clearly in the ASF somebody is getting paid for &#x27;maintaining&#x27; Apache&#x27;s version of star office, but clearly somebody is doing a bit of a fraud....

A bit off topic but what’s an easy to use FOSS WYSIWYG text processor for Linux?<p>I’ve tried OpenOffice and I became frustrated.

While it is true that OpenOffice didn&#x27;t get major updates for nearly a decade, it does what it&#x27;s supposed to do, and is pretty stable. I still use it as it&#x27;s faster than LibreOffice and I&#x27;m used to it. And why spam Apache to deprecate OO? It&#x27;s not like OO is doing any harm for Apache or its users, one can install LibreOffice instead if they want it.

I got 99 problems, and outting Open Office as umaintained ain&#x27;t one.

When you realize Apache is a hospice organization

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

Thanks for posting about Apache, now I remember I wanted to look into switching back to OpenOffice from LibreOffice to compare. OpenOffice I&#x27;m hoping didn&#x27;t ditch Java like the folks at LibreOffice did.

Surely if you don&#x27;t like a project rather than writing open letters and whatnot, you fork it? That&#x27;s the whole point of open source.<p>That&#x27;s how gcc project governance got fixed - egcs forked and made the improvements they wanted, won the argument and basically became the main branch. Some of the history is here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softpanorama.org&#x2F;People&#x2F;Stallman&#x2F;history_of_gcc_development.shtml" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softpanorama.org&#x2F;People&#x2F;Stallman&#x2F;history_of_gcc_deve...</a>