Projects become unmaintained every day. This is a fact of life, and is not the issue I am taking with The Apache Software Foundation. It is the way the foundation, and its contributors, do not disclose information relating to the lack of substantial updates or changes for nearly a decade, and seems to intentionally mask the lack of development.
I sometimes forget Open Office still exists. I have no idea why The Apache Software Foundation would regularly intentionally delete a few whitespaces to make it seem as if Open Office is still actively being developed.
This one really bugs me. I have seen many comments where people have confused Open Office and LibreOffice or even assumed that Open Office was the more official. In my view, Open Office is the better name. It negatively impacts LibreOffice and, by extension, the Open Source ecosystem and the Linux Desktop. Competing forks are fine but, as the article states, Open Office is really not even trying to compete in terms of providing usable software for its users.
At this point, it really seems malicious to keep Open Office around as an “active” project instead of pointing people at LibreOffice instead.
Does Apache have a big support contract with an large Open Office user somewhere? What is their incentive?
Wouldn’t this be somehow related to brands and trademarks?
From day one it was obvious that Open Office didn’t had the necessary manpower to go on under Apache.
It should had been refused to be included under Apache Foundation umbrella. Why it still goes on as a “zombieware” is mystery to me.
I laugh at the thought that someone might actually be getting paid for his “work” on this project, sending nice monthly activity reports with changed LoC and so on. 😀
The irony is that, while they are doing almost no software development, they are doing a great job of a lot of the stuff that Open Source projects typically suffer from. There is frequent communication. There is decent marketing. There are even fairly frequent “releases” ( last one in February ).
I wish other projects were half as good at communication. Compare the “dead” Open Office project blog with the communication from the “active” ReactOS project:
https://openoffice.apache.org/blogpage.html
https://reactos.org/project-news/
And it is working! Open Office announced they hit 350 million downloads in August last year after hitting 300 million at the end of 2021. At 50 million downloads in 8 months, they could be closing in on 500 million by now! Think of the damage this is doing to projects like LibreOffice.
Then compare the actual dev going on between Open Office and LibreOffice:
https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commits/trunk
https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/commits/master
OpenOffice’s last functional release may have been 2011, but their last maintenance release was earlier this year. It was adopted world wide by many very bureaucratic orgs like Police Depts, Defence Depts and schools. They have no desire to change – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Many would require permission or legislation they don’t have, and budgets they don’t have to make such a change. Some schools and nonprofits still use it because old documentation says so. To fix that someone has to update all the ancient documentation worldwide. Ain’t gonna happen.