Waiting for Apache Open Office

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/729460/ad130bc79f387e7e/

by dankohn1 • 9 years ago

119 72 9 years ago

lwn.net

okket• 9 years ago

Discussion from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747 (336 comments)

zokier• 9 years ago

Interesting tidbit about the meta here:

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> One thing has definitely changed: the last time LWN wrote a critical piece about the project, we had some AOOers drop by to repeatedly complain about what a bunch of meanies we all were for criticizing them instead of volunteering to help them out. This time? Crickets...
...or they are not LWN subscribers, and nobody posted a SubscriberLink somewhere they could find yet.
Last year I had posted a SubscriberLink to a LWN article about AOO to HN; I'm doing it again right now, so if they read HN and my post reaches the front page there, we might be able to see them here again.

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I'm not sure if HN is really supposed to be used like that..

db48x• 9 years ago

HN is not supposed to be used to foster discussion of interesting topics by people interested in them?

mindcrime4• 9 years ago

Last year I had posted a SubscriberLink to a LWN article about AOO to HN; I'm doing it again right now, so if they read HN and my post reaches the front page there, we might be able to see them here again.

Or maybe we're tired of wasting our time on this public drama, none of which - at the end of the day - helps get any software shipped.

I'm just sad that I don't personally have more cycles free to contribute to AOO. I have a bunch of stuff I want to work on, but my life is so chaotic right now that it doesn't happen. So I guess I share in the blame for the lack of AOO progress. I wish I had something more to tell you guys, but it's a project that's driven pretty much 100% by volunteers these days, and those volunteers do what they can while maintaining their day jobs, etc.

davidgerard2• 9 years ago

This is important: geeks know the score and use LibreOffice for this sort of thing - but ordinary people don't. "OpenOffice" still has stupendous brand awareness. You will have friends and family using this thing! Warn them, get them onto LO!

Oh, and well done to the Apache Software Foundation for falsifying the meeting minutes when a journalist came calling to ask what was up. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/apache_openoffice_n... Note that's not the "independent" project, but the board of the nonprofit itself doing that.

BTW, AOO will probably finally get 4.1.4 out this month - they've got a release candidate for Mac and Linux, just need someone to successfully build revision 1803945 for Windows. http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg313... http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg314...

scardine• 9 years ago

From the article:

As of 2017-Apr-12 we have more than 214,000,000 million [sic] downloads and it is still at a consistent rate with ~100,000 downloads in average per day". That is 100,000 people every day who are downloading the output of a project that clearly lacks the development capacity to get important bug fixes out to users, much less understand and improve the entirety of such a massive body of code.

100k downloads/day is a lot.

dublinben• 9 years ago

They're doing a disservice to their users by not redirecting them to the more actively maintained LibreOffice.

hdhzy3• 9 years ago

You will have friends and family using this thing! Warn them, get them onto LO!

I just installed LO 5.4 on HiDPI Windows. The LO home page (localized) advertised that "LibreOffice 4 (sic!) just arrived". Unfortunately it went downhill from there: the HiDPI support is kind of not really present. Icons have negative margins (are halfway visible) and what's even worse the hit targets are not where the icon lies! So you select item N from a list and item N-1 gets selected.

I get it that OO is now evil due to Oracle but LO is just not usable. I know, I know free software but advertising LO to my family and friends would be the quickest way of getting them to not to ask me any IT related advice. Which may be a good side effect in itself.

Edit: I just tried AOO. It works. Looks a little bit dated but the controls are where they should be and everything I tested works correctly.

chris_wot6• 9 years ago

Can you log a bug? And can you provide a link to that localised page? I'll alert the team.

buovjaga• 9 years ago

Here is our collection of HiDPI bugs: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/showdependencytree.cgi?i...

jancsika2• 9 years ago

Edit: I just tried AOO. It works. Looks a little bit dated but the controls are where they should be and everything I tested works correctly.

Just to be clear-- are you saying that OpenOffice correctly handles HiDPI in its GUI while LibreOffice does not?

When you say "the controls are where they should be," do you mean that the icons in OpenOffice are both properly sized in the GUI window as well as having the correct hitboxes?

I'd love to see some screenshots of the two side-by-side if you have some.

izzard• 9 years ago

@hdhzy:

The problem you are having with the icons and clicks mis-registering is due to OpenGL rendering. I had the same problem. Go to Tools-Options-View and disable OpenGL rendering, should fix the problem.

Looks like there is some problem with the Intel drivers and LibreOffice, not sure.

dEnigma• 9 years ago

It's frustrating. Most people seem to know about OpenOffice as a free alternative to Microsoft's Office Suite, but hardly anyone has heard about LibreOffice. Which leads to people trying out OpenOffice and concluding that Open Source Software isn't up to the task.

frik• 9 years ago

Apache foundation should donate the "OpenOffice" brand to LibreOffice!!

The OpenOffice brand is still very well know, and unfortunately the current situation might trick average joes to download and outdated unsupported build, while the very active LibreOffice is around the corner.

milankragujevic• 9 years ago

Agreed, my friend who installs software and OS' on companies' computers as a job, usually installs OpenOffice. He never heard of LibreOffice and was shocked when I told him that nobody uses OpenOffice anymore.

cbhl• 9 years ago

Frankly, the only reason I heard about LibreOffice is because I upgraded Ubuntu that one time

khedoros1• 9 years ago

I had a disagreement last year where someone was arguing for OpenOffice because it was the project they'd used for years, and I was arguing for LibreOffice because that's where all of the new development is. I was able to point to multiple major LO releases in the same period that one or two minor OO releases happened.

I don't remember if I ever convinced them, but it became even clearer to me that OO's development is the dried husk of its former self.

mwfunk• 9 years ago

This would be the best possible outcome. The whole LibreOffice naming thing was very unfortunate.

Jedd2• 9 years ago

No one should do anything ... but IMO the best outcome here would be for AOO to a) highlight the availability of LibreOffice on their landing page (with perhaps a header on their other web), and b) release a final OpenOffice version with some similar pop-up or notification that directs users towards LibreOffice.

newscracker2• 9 years ago

At the moment of this reply, your comment was downvoted, and I don't understand why. People, or at least techies, when talking about free/libre open source projects, see them as double edged swords - on one side, a diversity in solutions provides choice (and better chance of it being upheld over time) along with freedom to users, and on the other side, the complaints are usually about a lack of focus, with energy and time being split across projects rather than uniting against locked-in commercial interests. From the latter point of view, I personally would prefer AOO doing exactly what you stated in the interest of "greater good".

derekp7• 9 years ago

AOO could also fork LO, and call it AOO version 5. Then LO becomes to AOO what Debian is to Ubuntu.

newscracker2• 9 years ago

As fattire proposed in another comment

How would the Lo people feel about a simple redirect from Oo.o-> Lo.org w/some kind of banner welcoming users, and some kind of upgrade path from Oo->Lo?

That would be a better option, IMO. LibreOffice not being well known would be helped if such a move were done. Changing the name of LibreOffice to something else would be a longer marketing exercise, and if LibreOffice does want such a change, I'd rather have it become something entirely new with "Office" as a prefix or suffix than using the name OpenOffice (I personally don't like it because of the history associated with it).

pbhjpbhj• 9 years ago

I've not looked at this in years but as I remember it Apache took over the OpenOffice.org brand and that OOo could not be "Open Office" (or a direct variation) as that was already a [text] trademark for an office suite [or something in class 9] from some other source.

Isn't that why it's "Apache OpenOffice" because they can't call it just "OpenOffice", similarly Siemens have a mark "HiPath OpenOffice".

Eg https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00... a dead application for "openoffice" from Oracle, expired in 1997 on non-payment of renewal.

[A modicum of research ensues ...]

Seems, https://www.tmdn.org/tmview/bookmark?s=ju0uijpgg5uupublble76..., there's a valid mark in Canada, Switzerland, and Russia owned variously by Sun, Oracle, Apache.

It's very generic IMO; a poor mark even if it could be secured.

CJefferson2• 9 years ago

With the number of publicly known security holes in the last Apache Open Office release, I feel this is getting close to criminal behaviour -- waiting this long without making a new release, or making clear at least on the download page the software is unsafe, shouldn't be acceptable (or in my opinion legal).

bad_user• 9 years ago

I don't understand why this should be illegal.

The value of open source is that the code is there for anybody that wants to contribute, or fork in case people find its maintenance unsuitable. And even if the project dies, the code remains there for anybody to pick it up later, in case it has value. It has happened before, it can happen again. On the other hand most open source volunteers are unpaid and have no contractual obligation.

So tell me who is the criminal?

The Apache Foundation? But that's silly, since this project might have been simply dumped on GitHub. The few volunteers that tried pushing some fixes since last year? Oracle for donating the project? Speak for yourself in this case, because I'd rather have companies release their stuff, instead of locking it away.

This is an upsetting entitlement complex show here. If you want to contribute, then do so, otherwise GTFO.

CJefferson2• 9 years ago

The criminality is putting a program on the internet which you know is full of security holes.

It's not legal for me to set up a shop selling known faulty electronics, or even give them away for free unless I make clear I know they are faulty. I wonder if this should be extended to tech.

I'm not saying they have to take the code down entirely, but they could pop a big warning on the download page at least. They are knowingly having thousands of downloads a day of software they have known is dangerously broken for over a year.

w8rbt• 9 years ago

Why did they fork?

geodel• 9 years ago

Oracle Copyrights etc.

TallGuyShort3• 9 years ago

My understanding was LibreOffice, a better maintained project, forked to further distance itself from Oracle. When Apache accepted the OpenOffice project Oracle assigned all trademarks, etc. Are you referring to something else?

edit: See the second and third subsections under this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History. LibreOffice was the fork motivated by dissatisfaction with Oracle. OpenOffice code was donated, along with trademarks, etc. to the ASF.

chris_wot6• 9 years ago

At this point, it is clear that Apache OpenOffice is dead. The Apache board have been utterly irresponsible in accepting Oracle's "donation" of the trademark. They were, quite simply, suckered.

I'm a contributor to LibreOffice, but don't speak on behalf of the TDF. But IMO, I don't think LibreOffice devs would be at all happy with a rename to OpenOffice - that ship has long sailed and the history of obstructionism, poor quality in terms of builds, bad faith comments from leaders at AOO and an utter inability to maintain their own software has sullied their brand to the point it's in many ways a net liability to take on the OpenOffice name now.

LibreOffice has made literally thousands of code improvements and major refactoring is still ongoing. If anything the rate has gone up exponentially, to the point now where we are beginning to actually compete with Microsoft Office. We are already better at a number if things than the Microsoft product - we even produce more compact XML than what is generated by the latest version of Office. In fact, in terms of product direction you have a far better chance of influencing product features in LO and getting issues resolved than you'll ever have with Microsoft. Microsoft Connect is less than useless in so many ways, it's not terribly open and I've seen bug reports that are acknowledged and sat on for years - with LO, you can pay a reasonable amount of money to a third party to get the feature implemented or the bug fixed. You could never do this with Microsoft.

I think that the way Oracle went about things should be a lesson for any company or organization: Oracle cannot be trusted, and if they give you a code dump, if there is a competing fork then seriously consider whether they should be consulted and supported before you accept the "gift" from Oracle.

fattire• 9 years ago

How would the Lo people feel about a simple redirect from Oo.o-> Lo.org w/some kind of banner welcoming users, and some kind of upgrade path from Oo->Lo?

slitaz• 9 years ago

I don't know about the LibreOffice people. I know that the AOO would NEVER allow that. There is enough hatred that keeps them going.

mindcrime4• 9 years ago

Oracle cannot be trusted, and if they give you a code dump, if there is a competing fork then seriously consider whether they should be consulted and supported before you accept the "gift" from Oracle.

What exactly is it you think Oracle did wrong, w/r/t the ASF? They donated code and trademarks, and as far as I can tell, they delivered exactly what they promised. Beyond that , everybody involved in AOO knew about LO from the beginning.. there was no confusion on that point.

If anything, the biggest lesson for AOO should be more about over-dependence on paid developers from one company. But in this case, that "one company" was IBM, not Oracle. AOO was moving along quite well until IBM decided to yank their support and all the paid staff they had working on the project. But then again, everybody involved knew that was a risk, from the beginning.

scarmig• 9 years ago

Imagine your neighbor Larry comes to your front door, with a sick and dying dog that's suffered abuse and malnourishment. He kindly offers it to you, telling you about its storied past as a beloved television character, as well as all the veterinary papers saying it's a sick, dying dog. Everything's above board. What do you do?

Yeah, Apache was stupid for accepting the dog. But it's also good to be pretty damn skeptical anytime Larry offers you anything.

watwut• 9 years ago

It is basically "we are winning but you are evil for even trying to compete with us" ideology.

thrillgore• 9 years ago

I wonder if the other big Oracle project being pawned off to the great retirement home in the sky, NetBeans, will be pulled out of Incubator and thrown in the trash.

carussell• 9 years ago

Anything that gets projects to move off the CDDL in favor of better licenses (like Apache 2.0) is a good thing.

jonotime2• 9 years ago

Genuine curiosity. Since I dont know much about the nitty gritty history of the fork. Who are these couple people who work on AOO instead of LO and why do they?

Do they think its a better product? Better community? Brand loyalty? Money? Did they loose a bet?

I'm not trolling (ok - maybe a little with the last question). I just want to know the story here.

a3n• 9 years ago

Apache was given OO by Oracle, and people in Apache then treated it as the Apache project that it had become; it didn't work out as well as some other Apache projects.

jonotime2• 9 years ago

Doesnt really answer my question. Who are these "people in apache" who cannot see like LibreOffice is more mature product? Well, what does "people in apache" mean?

microwavecamera• 9 years ago

It was mostly over the the acquisition of Open Office by Oracle when they bought Sun. Oracle owned the trademark to Open Office, changed the name to Oracle Open Office and development slowed. Around the same time Oracle had killed OpenSolaris, Sun's open-source version of Solaris, and changed Solaris back to a proprietary product. There's was concern in the open-source community that Oracle would either kill Open Office all together or try to spin it off as a commercial product. So OO was forked and most of the core OO developers jumped ship.

0x0• 9 years ago

The Register posted about this mystery 4.1.4 security fix mentioned in the board minutes back in April. After the article was published, the meeting record appeared to have been edited and any mention of security fixes removed (with time stamps in the apache directory list revealing as much) - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/apache_openoffice_n...

It was also quite telling that when a security vulnerability in 4.1.1 was discovered, at least when checking the wayback machine the earliest security announcement was posted at April 29th 2015 ( http://web.archive.org/web/20150429084734/https://www.openof... ) and while multiple snapshots have been captured since ( http://web.archive.org/web/20150501000000*/https://www.openo... ) it took until November 1st 2015 for the recommendation to change from "delete the .dll" to "upgrade to 4.1.2" ( http://web.archive.org/web/20151101015732/https://www.openof... ). At least until September 24th 2015, version 4.1.1 was still the latest version and the recommendation to delete the .dll was still present ( http://web.archive.org/web/20150924061922/https://www.openof... )

mcbits3• 9 years ago

So, it appears the problem is that OpenOffice still has all the brand recognition, while LibreOffice suffers from a lack of awareness. The chances are slim to none that LibreOffice will ever be able adopt the OpenOffice trademark.

I think the LibreOffice project should use this opportunity to rebrand themselves and build even more distance from OpenOffice and MS Office. Pick a name that's easier to pronounce, spell, and remember - simple English words without two vowels in a row. (What was that? Did you say Leebray Office? Libruh Office? Lib Roffice? Does this have something to do with Mexicans and liberals? We're capitalists here!)

Everyone who cares about "libre" software will still know it's libre without putting it in the name. Communicate that this is the office suite that successful people use, not the one that poor people use because they're poor.

Avshalom• 9 years ago

While Libreoffice doesn't sound like a skin disease it is damn close

pmontra• 9 years ago

I agree it could be difficult for English speakers. I think there are no problems with the name and its pronunciation in continental Europe or Latin America. I wonder how it is in Asia (some large English speaking countries there though.) Africa?

ProtoAES256• 9 years ago

Confirming for Asia(self representing, and observed) No, the mass population don't know about anything open source etc.etc. and for tech savvy and geeks, few and mostly think that open source hurts economy and are not feasible. While LibreOffice has been used by some, people are not aware on open source related projects. One might not recognise the difference between LibreOffice and AOO/OOo and MSO. Open Source related communities are either small or nonexistent in most Asian countries. Some are due to more alarming real-world problems to deal with or basic human rights(dat big country) and civil rights are not even respected to begin with. And no, actually it's the Chinese speaking country(Taiwan) that have far more recognition and awareness on Libre Office over other Asian countries and friends that I met and have online. AOO/OOo has dwindled at Taiwan too, and sure, LibreOffice seems weird at first, but understanding the meaning behind it is enough to convince a user to pronounce it. We have other weird names too. Lots of weird names. //didn't proof read

goodplay• 9 years ago

I disagree. To most normal users, I expect they perceive libreoffice and openpffice.org to be distinct separate projects. Only techies who have been following openoffice.org would know that one is a fork of the other (and even that distinction is starting to become irreverent as both both projects further diverge in terms of feature sets).

I also think that while LibreOffice is relatively new, it name has already begun to spread among normal users. I think it be very unwise to throw that good reputation away and start over. I also happen to be quite found of their current name, LibreOffice. I think it's classy and easy to remember.

captainmuon• 9 years ago

When people want OpenOffice, I just give them LibreOffice. Non technical people can deal with that dissonance, after all, Office says something like "FILE untitled" on top, and not "Microsoft Office".

LibreOffice and the document foundation can't use the OpenOffice trademark, but that doesn't mean we can't. We should write a lot of articles pointing to LibreOffice and calling it The OpenOffice, and try to make LibreOffice the #1 search result for OpenOffice. Let's genericize the hell out of OpenOffice.

Trademarks should ideally serve to protect customers, so they get what they think they are buying. But this is one of the cases where the exclusive right to the trademark hurts customers.

mcbits3• 9 years ago

Diluting the trademark is an interesting thought, but I'm pretty sure it would backfire. After all that effort, it will still take a court battle just to gamble on proving the trademark generic. The lawyers will dig up threads like this to show conspiracy. When it all flops, OpenOffice comes away with a ton of publicity and a stronger brand than ever before. Silver lining: maybe that would be enough to jump-start development.

If the community were to write a ton of articles pointing to LibreOffice and calling it anything, that would help brand recognition for whatever they're calling it. MindStream, Keen Suite, Able Office, The Expressive Toolbox, the open office called LibreOffice, ... (random ideas)

I think LibreOffice can and probably will absorb OpenOffice's mind share over time, but I don't think either one stands a chance to become the standard suite that everyone expects to find everywhere. Not as long as dull license terms that almost nobody cares about remain the core of their identity.

davidgerard2• 9 years ago

Naming LibreOffice turned out to be very difficult indeed.

http://luxate.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/agreeing-on-childs-name...

tl;dr trademarks in lots of countries, URL availability in lots of countries. This stuff is hard. "Why don't they just make up a new name?" Well, that explains why.

mcbits3• 9 years ago

He also doesn't sound very excited about the name, but "it was already hard enough to settle on this name" is reasonable enough I guess. I wonder what they would have come up with without the self-imposed constraint to sound like a derivative of OpenOffice.

Shorel• 9 years ago

In almost every language there is only one way to read 'libre' out loud.

It seems English is the only exception.

sgs1370• 9 years ago

OpenOffice is much less annoying so I keep using it. Does everything I need to do. I haven't even upgraded to the most recent version, the one I have is fine. Not-for-profit orgs like Libre and Mozilla have their own motivations for pushing people to stop using software that is free and works, with no ads (no, not saying Libre has ads, but OO doesn't either, so why disparage it?)

mindcrime4• 9 years ago

Anyway, things are not quite so dire as this article makes out. See:

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/openoffice-dev/2017...

So yes, development on AOO is absolutely continuing. Is the pace slower than we'd all like? Absolutely. Would we welcome newcomers to help out? Absolutely. In the meantime, the volunteers that are around are doing what they can.

I really wish people would let this whole supposed "AOO vs LO rivalry" thing go. At this point, I'm pretty sure the bulk of the AOO contributors don't see LO as a rival, and mostly don't care what LO does, so long as people affiliated with LO aren't running us down in public. The two projects will probably never re-merge, so it is what it is. They do their thing, AOO does its thing. Such is the way of things.

cwyers• 9 years ago

I really wish people would let this whole supposed "AOO vs LO rivalry" thing go. At this point, I'm pretty sure the bulk of the AOO contributors don't see LO as a rival, and mostly don't care what LO does, so long as people affiliated with LO aren't running us down in public. The two projects will probably never re-merge, so it is what it is. They do their thing, AOO does its thing. Such is the way of things.

Given that most of the energy is with one project and not the other, and codebases have diverged so much that one can't accept patches from the other, why is it beneficial to have both? Who does OOo serve that LO doesn't? And why would a volunteer choose to work on OOo and not LO if they weren't on the OOo side of the fork to begin with?

mindcrime4• 9 years ago

why is it beneficial to have both? Who does OOo serve that LO doesn't? And why would a volunteer choose to work on OOo and not LO if they weren't on the OOo side of the fork to begin with?

It sounds like you expect some sort of objective, definitive answer to those questions. I don't think there are any such answers. A lot of people use AOO, a bit fewer contribute to development. I can't explain the motivations of any of those people, outside of myself. I can't even explain why so many of the "old school" OO developers "sided" - so to speak - with LO, other than just the timing of the thing.

But I came into AOO after a lot of the weird stuff had already happened, that created all this bitterness and resentment between the two projects. I'm a bit of an outsider as it were. So I have a hard time understanding why there even is all this acrimony and tension at all.

So I don't have a lot of good answers for you. All I can say is that, for myself, I gravitated to AOO for a few reasons:

1. I prefer the Apache License

2. I was familiar with, and liked, the ASF way of doing things.

3. I started out with high hopes to leverage what seemed like a natural synergy between AOO and other ASF projects. In particular, some of the Semantic Web tech (Jena, Fuseki), and all the "big data" projects. It just felt natural to me to want to work on AOO since there was a certain amount of overlap in membership between these various projects, etc.

Sadly, I got so bogged down with other activities, that I have never found time to really contribute to AOO and work on a lot of the things I had hoped to work on. I still cling to some of those ambitions, but other priorities keep getting in the way.

Sorry for the long, rambling semi-answer. I'm tired and just kind of going "stream of consciousness" here.

Waiting for Apache Open Office

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