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Is Apache OpenOffice Finally On the Way Out? (apache.org)
Reader JImbob0i0 writes: After almost another year without a release and another major CVE leaving users vulnerable for that year the Chairman of the Project Management Committee has started public discussions on what it will entail to retire the project, following the Apache Board showing concern at the poor showing.
It's been a long battle which would have been avoided if Oracle had not been so petty. Did this behaviour actually help get momentum in the community underway though? What ifs are always hard to properly answer. Hopefully this long drawn out death rattle will finally come to a close and the wounds with LibreOffice can heal with the last few contributors to AOO joining the rest of the community.
It's been a long battle which would have been avoided if Oracle had not been so petty. Did this behaviour actually help get momentum in the community underway though? What ifs are always hard to properly answer. Hopefully this long drawn out death rattle will finally come to a close and the wounds with LibreOffice can heal with the last few contributors to AOO joining the rest of the community.
Another victim of the Oracle bean counters. It is amazing how much value a talented group of people can destroy when they work at it.
MS Office will always be superior. Why use a crappy clone when the best is readily available?
Source? That sounds like you made it up. Are these companies who don't retain attorneys?
Not to mention the name.... LibreOffice.... God, I wish I could have met the guy who first suggested that name and kick him in the balls, hard! Stupid asshole!
There are multiple large companies that straight out ban LibreOffice on their premises because of the risk that macros and document data will have to be released as GPL.
Then they deserve to have higher costs for retaining idiotic lawyers. I hope they keep it up, it'll make my company more competitive.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
just open source licenses functioning as intended.
This seems idiotic.
Oracle's antics caused me to switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, not from any "GPL Purity" reasons (which I care little about) but from a reasonable suspicion that Oracle, being Evil, would soon do something I did not like.
When it was given to Apache, I'd basically consider it a toss-up between the two, but I was already on LibreOffice, and didn't have any particular reason to go back. Since then, Libre seems to be a more active project than Open, so I prefer it on that basis.
I suspect that's a lot of the issue -- People left "because Oracle" (makes Signs against Evil) they're very close to the same software, one is getting more work done on it than the other, no particular reason to prefer OpenOffice.
What did they do this time?
With the AOO project folding up its tent, that just leave LO and the small projects like Abiword and Gnumeric to fill in the office app space. Of course, it also means that Red Hat takes control of yet another big user space project that now has no competition. Look for essential LO dependencies on systemd coming soon, and gradual death of LO on Windows.
Hello! I am here. I am Johann, and I am recommend naming of LibreOffice at our conference of 2009.
I wonder why you wish harm on me! Perhaps you are the ass hole.
OpenOffice died the moment LibreOffice forked it. The ghost of OpenOffice.org just didn't know it was dead. When most of your major developers leave to carry on a competing project, the prior project dies.
Completely agree. If the management there is so under-educated and stupid to think that everything done in LibreOffice must be GPL released then they absolutely deserve it.
It utterly amazes me how people that pass themselves off as leaders and higher educated are typically some of the stupidest people out there.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What business exactly gives a damn about the licensing the product is under? Unless it's a development shop looking at making and distributing modifications, and wants to be able to control whether it has to make those changes available, no business just using the software gives a rat's ass whether it's an Apache license, GPL, BSD License, or proprietary closed license. They just want the software to work and be supported.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I didn't make it up. I was told that by my Microsoft rep, and so I listened to him. Have you heard of the company, ArseKicks Software? I bet you haven't. They had to release all of their macros and document data to the public as GPL, and now they are no longer around because of it. In fact, if you Google it, ever trace of them has been wiped off of history, due to the GPL viral license.
What if a chick suggested it?
Stupid names are how open-source gains street-cred. It's why we have Gimp, PostreSql, Mozilla, and Ogg Vorbis. The more un-corporate it sounds, the better.
It's gotta sound alien, commie, and/or like medical symptoms. Extra kudo points if you cover all three.
Table-ized A.I.
I haven't been keeping up with the details of the pie fight. Apart from the licensing issue (which, for your typical end-user, is not an issue at all), what features separate Apache OpenOffice from LibreOffice.org?
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Let Open Office die. LibreOffice is much, much better!
There are multiple large companies that straight out ban LibreOffice on their premises because of the risk that macros and document data will have to be released as GPL.
Then they deserve to have higher costs for retaining idiotic lawyers. I hope they keep it up, it'll make my company more competitive.
I interviewed for a SysAdmin position at a government contractor way back in 1998 and asked about flexible working hours. The manager said their lawyers said it wasn't allowed. I said my current company, also a contractor at the same facility, had flexible hours. The manager said, "I don't know how they can do that." and I replied, "Perhaps we have better lawyers." They offered me a job, but I (obviously) didn't accept. Besides that stupidity, they only had 1 computer with Internet access, on a desk in a common area.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I didn't make it up. I was told that by my Microsoft rep, and so I listened to him. Have you heard of the company, ArseKicks Software? I bet you haven't. They had to release all of their macros and document data to the public as GPL, and now they are no longer around because of it. In fact, if you Google it, ever trace of them has been wiped off of history, due to the GPL viral license.
Funny. "ArseKicks Software" doesn't show up in Google. Either they were so obscure that nobody ever heard of them (which would explain why they went under, rather than any GPL issue), or they never existed. I'd bet on the latter, personally.
They changed their name to "Whoooosh, Inc" soon after that incident.
Whoosh!
It uses Java so its massive quantity of busy waits and dead locks may have reached the level where it needs to get purged from the system.
I didn't make it up. I was told that by my Microsoft rep, and so I listened to him. Have you heard of the company, ArseKicks Software? I bet you haven't. They had to release all of their macros and document data to the public as GPL, and now they are no longer around because of it. In fact, if you Google it, ever trace of them has been wiped off of history, due to the GPL viral license.
Funny. "ArseKicks Software" doesn't show up in Google. Either they were so obscure that nobody ever heard of them (which would explain why they went under, rather than any GPL issue), or they never existed. I'd bet on the latter, personally.
"In fact, if you Google it, ever trace of them has been wiped off of history, due to the GPL viral license".
Also, whoosh.
Names they are trying:
Old Yeller
Titanic
Spartacus
McMurphy
Oracle (for whatever reason) has no community trust. MariaDB and other forks are getting common use and will likely see the same shift.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
I hope that OpenOffice will hand over their trade mark to LibreOffice. Especially many Windows users do not seem to know that LibreOffice exists, and are still using the now outdated OpenOffice. It would be great if the OpenOffice sites would point to LibreOffice, a worthy successor of them.
Quick, somebody get Trump over here.
Not saying that this is in fact the way the law would work, but ....
The Lawyers may actually be worried about macros and such, which they might believe would be covered under the license and require that those be put back out into the community as well. Not sure if this is an actual fact, but I could see lawyers worrying about this kind of thing and if something similar is available at the same cost that completely does away with any confusion for me on that topic, I might be a bad enough lawyer to do the same thing.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
So, the Microsoft rep made it up...nice to know Microsoft is still spreading FOSS FUD.
Red
Asteroid
Pussball
FTW!
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
That would be akin to saying that every web page served from a server using GPLv2 licensed Linux kernel would automatically be licensed under the same license. Or that every program compiled using a GPL licensed compilers would automatically be licensed under GPL, too. The makers of many popular GPL-licensed programs also alleviate "license scaremongering" by the use of additional permissions.
Your comment was an obvious joke, but it's not to say that many people *do*, erroneously, think like that.
-SR
Maybe if GP had written instead, "I didn't make it up. I was told that by your mom," you would understand it was a joke all along.
Yes, a lot of company layers do think that exactly about GPL. I'm in a software development shop for a very large Fortune 20 company, that embraces open source, yet GPL is like the plague here. We have our lawyers very every open source package we intend to use -- but if it is GPL: forget it.
Apache, BSD, and other licenses they have no qualms with approving. Not saying that they would never approve a GPL licensed package, but expect it to easily take 6-months (or longer) and you spending all you time doing code scans and application profiling to prove how the code is linked.
one micro-second later, I downloaded and switched. I havn't looked back. Thank you LibreOffice.
Oracle attempts to make an obscene profit on any thing it touches and usually destroys it in the process if it can't.
It's the same reason why I won't use virtualbox either.. Now if someone would fork that and get USB support into open-source support (if possible), I would gladly switch due to the impending implosion of VMWare's Workstation after they fired all of their devs. Workstation is dead (much like AOO died), Workstation just doesn't know it yet... We'll probably never see another major release of Workstation and V12 is a POS since it dropped unity and only partially supports DX10 video. I'm "stuck" on V11
That would be akin to saying that every web page served from a server using GPLv2 licensed Linux kernel would automatically be licensed under the same license.
Yeah screw that. I'm not sharing the source code of my website with anyone!
Linus Torvalds said recently that people who don't care about their code release it under BSD/MIT style licenses. I tend to agree with him.
OUT! OUT! OUT!
Not to mention the name.... LibreOffice.... God, I wish I could have met the guy who first suggested that name and kick him in the balls, hard! Stupid asshole!
Kick the LibreSSL people in the balls too.
Been a AOO user for quite some time and always annoyed by its bugginess but its usable for my needs. Comment section explained a lot. On my way to move to Libre Office now... and I know why now. Thanks all!
Oi, mate! There's a queue.
Ha! I've already got the source code of your website.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
God Lord, you're REALLY a sucker if you believe ANYthing a "Microsoft rep" tells you.... Of course, you're an AC, therefore a troll, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised at your comment...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
How can they be concerned the GPL when LibreOffice (and OpenOffice.org prior to Oracle and Apache) is licensed under the LGPL?
Uh huh, sure you do.
Idiot.
Your information is out of date. Whoooosh, Inc was later bought out by Strawman Incorporated, a virtual dark company registered somewhere in Panama, or was it the Caymans, whose very existence is denied by the company's lawyers, even if they existed.
I'll be honest: I have no idea what this is about. Are there Apache OpenOffice v. LibreOffice religious wars? I'm passively looking for a replacement for Microsoft Office. The news that Apache OpenOffice *might* be discontinued is by itself the kiss of death.
Is LibreOffice any good? This on their web site "LibreOffice is a powerful office suite – its clean interface and feature-rich tools help you unleash your creativity and enhance your productivity" makes me cringe. But Microsoft makes me cringe, so that's okay.
Libreoffice is MPL, not GPL, moron.
Don't blame me. I wanted it called Officey McOfficeface.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
You are making a joke, but, well.
The html is a very small part of the code base of any reasonable web page these days.
LibreOffice is moving into MPL.
There seems to be hope that OpenOffice will disappear and leave the field to LibreOffice.
However, LibreOffice has a terrible name and is not alone, you will see occasionally LibreThis and LibreThat.
The issue is that 'free' in Engish may point to free as in beer and free as in freedom.
Please, Slashdot, collect suggestions from readers for a new name. Methinks LibreOffice should morph to FreedomOffice.
When you serve a web page, the HTML markup and JavaScript is only part of the output the server generates. This output, including the markup and actual text/image content, is served to the people visiting a website, not the code that generates the output.
By having to license the output, everyone visiting a web page would have full commercial rights to the web page's content. Imagine your web page contained a novel text: anyone visiting that page could grab that novel and sell it under a GPL license. This was the issue I was replying to, and said it was not so; the output of a program licensed under GPL is not automatically licensed under GPL also.
So if I completely misunderstood your joke, please correct me. But it makes no sense to me as it is because the source code of a website and the output of that code are two completely different things.
If you share your website's full backend source on every download, you're doing something terribly wrong.
-SR
There was that going on at an electricity company I was working for in 1996 - for "quality" reasons (everything was for "quality" reasons) there was only one machine with WEB access on a desk in a common area and a booking sheet to use it.
As for NET access, we had email, and in those days ftpmail was a thing so cunning employees with email only access could send requests to an ftpmail server out on the net to email web pages, http downloads or ftp downloads. Attachment size limits were set to be very large back then.
As fas as I understand the GPL they would only have to provide the macros to those persons that they provide the document to.
Yeah screw that. I'm not sharing the source code of my website with anyone!
As well you shouldn't. It's very common for the source-code to contain security-sensitive information. For example, I've seen plenty of PHP websites where the password to the MySQL database was hard-coded right in the PHP source-code.
Anyone who thinks your comment is "insightful" has a serious lack of knowledge about web site security.
Linus deserves kudos for his skills.
But understanding the motivations of other people, and why they may choose to release software under a given license, is not one of them.
If the GPL applied, then yes, that's right, but you don't need to put your documents under the GPL just to edit them with a GPLed piece of software. The only way they'd end up GPLed is if you deliberately licensed them as such for some reason (at which point you have only yourself to blame if you decide you didn't want to do that).
Lets just hope this happens in such a way that current OpenOffice users find out about LibreOffice.
This is why we need a "-20 million: stupid beyond belief" mod.
In a recent interview with Satan, he said that Microsoft is still way ahead of Oracle in doing evil.
Oh, wait. Oracle apparently and unfortunately seems to have a highly viable financial model. The current problem is merely that OpenOffice is NOT a part of those profits.
So how about considering SOLUTIONS. At least LibreOffice got mentioned in a couple of posts, but the underlying problem remains unaddressed: Is the financial model viable? I don't know enough about LibreOffice to say, but if the economic model is as fundamentally broken, then it doesn't really matter, does it?
What about a BETTER financial model? Beating the same dead horse, but how about creating a simple mechanism for the lusers... Er, I mean the honorable users, to fund OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) with special focus on the features they actually WANT?
I just love flogging that dead horse, don't I? Even worse that the same dead horse could be used to make slashdot viable (pending its next change of ownership and debt assumption).
Yeah, of course I'm talking about the idea of the charity share brokerage where the users would buy shares in ongoing-cost projects for features they want to keep using and feature development projects for new features. At this point I can only believe that it's the breakeven idea that is anathema. Unless there are profits, no one is interested, eh?
I'd start another poll on the topic, but it seems pointless. If anyone is interested (and I'm not holding my breath), feel free to make the polite request for additional details. Meanwhile, I'll continue switching over to LibreOffice pending its demise. OpenOffice, it was nice knowing ya, and I'll try to attend the funeral if it's sufficiently convenient.
Oh yeah. One more thing. I have to express the usual disappointment with the state of today's slashdot and the lack of high-quality comments. If the charity share brokerage system were in effect, features that would improve the quality of the discussions would be my favored donations. Not sure if that means addressing the trollage or fixing the moderation, but right now there is no decision to be made because there is no such system.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Can someone explain to me what the joke was? Or maybe the funny mod doesn't mean anything? Or perhaps I also lost my sense of humor when my vote was removed?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
In my best Foghorn Leghorn impression: "That there Microsoft bit is what they call a joke, son!"
It's funny in the way Dilbert is funny.
Does everything I need to do.
Why would us "last few contributors to AOO [join] the rest of the community"? Do you imagine we don't contribute to LibreOffice only because AOO still exists?
No, you ignorant twat, you have the output from his website generator. ...
You do not have the "source code" of anything.
Fucking noob