I've felt for a long time (maybe even a decade) that Apache is the place OSS goes to retire/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.
It is also a totally unfair characterization. I mean, they still house relevant projects including Kafka, Lucene, Zookeeper, Spark, Arrow and many others.
But it does feel Apache lives in a kind of stasis, a relic of the "old" web, like geocities sites or MySpace. If a project ends up in Apache it feels to me like it has gone out to pasture.
It seems that “younger generation” programmers underestimate the value of governance in OSS. The recent Terraform kerluffle couldn’t have happened if Terraform was in the ASF, etc.
Apache has lots of active projects. But they are mostly data analysis. At work, we use Airflow to run Spark jobs which uses Hadoop and Hive.
Apache also has a lot of dead projects that never got picked up by users. Apache should have a marker for zombie projects so people don't start using them.
> If a project ends up in Apache it feels to me like it has gone out to pasture.
There are many Apache Foundation projects that are active and important or complete and important.
Unfortunately OpenOffice is not any of the above, and it was that way almost from the beginning. The original OO community largely went with LibreOffice. They did not like the interference of Oracle and later IBM in their project's governance. So, Apache got the trademarks from Oracle and a community of people who were largely not maintainers. This put Apache, almost from day one, in position to be competing with the community of one of their own projects.
> I've felt for a long time (maybe even a decade) that Apache is the place OSS goes to retire/die.
It's a bit too strong as others have pointed out that there are very active projects under the Apache umbrella. But I do feel that there's a core of truth in this. Specifically, Apache does appear to provide a "way out" for large enterprise customers that want to dump non-strategic (to them) code somewhere and not necessarily invest in it. Seems something that could be solvable on the ASF side by having additional criteria before accepting projects, and maybe require a certain level of activity for continued membership.
At work I've lovingly but sadly referred to Apache as the "Crazy Cat Lady of Software." From the outside it looks like they're willing to take on any project that someone wants to give away regardless of whether they have the capacity to provide maintenance / governance of it themselves.
While I do love the preservation aspect of it, seeing that a project is maintained by Apache rings the same "Sure, but is the project already dead" bells in my head that I hear when I see a project from Google. In both cases, the name brings the concern that a project might be on its way out.
I was recently searching around for a good enterprise search engine and wanted something OSS. I found Apache Lucene and so far I really like it. It's got documentation, a clear release schedule, and I know lots of other people use it. I was happy to hear that it's Apache because it probably means it won't die because one maintainer goes away. Maybe it's silly, but if I find a project is Apache it gives me a good feeling.
Of course some of their projects die. That's OSS. But that's not something you can solve for. Even paid software goes away after awhile.
Unless it’s one of their many durable Java projects, or the web server that bares its name.
I think some things were (are?) bad fits for the ASF and languished as a result.
If you do a lot of development in the JVM ecosystem though you’ll find there’s a lot of ASF projects that are actively used and maintained
Go to die, or go to provide incremental improvements? Maybe a bit of both? Either said, it's a good question.
Some projects are going to die, and I don't think that's the fault of the organization behind it. I'd love to see a more detailed analysis of all the current projects at Apache, and their growth/decline, and a breakdown of _why_ they're growing or declining. Maybe Apache is the problem, maybe it isn't.
A big part of the problem is that the Apache foundation has become sort of a dumping ground for OSS projects where the corporate sponsor doesn’t want to be responsible anymore. They pull the full time developers and donate the project. In this context it’s not surprising that these projects “die”, because they’ve lost most or all of their contributors.
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.
Sun indeed had largely reduced its involvement in the project in the last years, and there was the "Symphony incident" [1]. The death blow was when Oracle arrived, started the trial with Google over Java/Android, inherited MySQL and almost killed it, inherited OpenOffice and the future did not look bright anymore [2, in German]
At about the same Sun, Oracle, IBM et al were cooling on the idea of developing comprehensive office software suites (~2008–2012), online suites like Google Workspace and Zoho were arriving in force, as were supporting do-business-online-not-on-the-desktop tools like Wrike.
If the OpenOffice kerfuffles weren't sapping enough energy out of the ecosystem, that users could suddenly use free, no-install-ever, not-equivalent-but-still-fine online tools did the rest.
Used to be an enthusiastic OpenOffice and LibreOffice user and developer—not of the core tools, but as part of bigger document processing and publishing workflows. Even presented at the OpenOffice Conference in 2007 (Moit de gust, Barcelona!) But after Google Docs, Sheets, etc. ... have not needed OpenOffice or LibreOffice nor used them in anger for over a decade.
> 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.
I mean... can you blame them? I would have forked too, if anything out of caution. The lawnmower has no feeling.
Apache's stubborn refusal to direct OpenOffice users towards LibreOffice has done immeasurable harm to the Apache brand and it's basically ruined the OpenOffice brand. A great example of the damage that can be done by poor stewardship.
Has it? I have used both libreoffice and openoffice, I had no idea openoffice was related to asf until I read your post. I have heard other talk about how people should use libreoffice, but it isn't apparent why.
I think the continued co-opting of the name of a first nation as their "brand" despite repeated calls from stake holders to do otherwise has caused plenty of harm to the ASF brand.
The trunk branch, the Bugzilla list, the OS/2 support, the user forums, the multi-hour build process, the XHTML 1.0 compliant badge on the https://www.openoffice.org/ homepage .....
Many years ago I became proficient with the Linux kernel build process, and later regularly built Mozilla with my preferred configuration and so forth. Both processes take some doing. I thought building OpenOffice couldn't be much of a challenge, it wasn't an operating system after all. I can't recall if I ever got it done. If I did, it was certainly the most vanilla possible build, taking all the defaults for a bog-standard build.
Okay, so we've known this is happening for a while. But why though?
First, I don't understand what's the ASF'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?
And given the licensing allows, why don't they rebrand LibreOffice, rather than keeping a zombie of a project?
Or why don'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).
Board reports (including project reports) are open (with 1-2 month delay, they are published only after approval, at the next Board Meeting).
Of course everyone agrees with OP's post. It's been dead for a while. We've been trying to convince Apache leadership to kill it forever. The problem is that the ASF is fundamentally broken. It'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.
> 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.
I'm really confused about this. It's the slimmest possible veneer, collapsing upon a cursory browse of the commit history. Why put in the time to update at all?
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 also 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's a lack of leadership.
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.
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…)
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
I wonder what would happen if someone just bought openoffice.net and tried to get the top slot on Google for "open office". 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.
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.
Developing an open source "office suite" that is ready for the next decade of ubiquitous ML/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.
[+] [-] zoogeny|2 years ago|reply
It is also a totally unfair characterization. I mean, they still house relevant projects including Kafka, Lucene, Zookeeper, Spark, Arrow and many others.
But it does feel Apache lives in a kind of stasis, a relic of the "old" web, like geocities sites or MySpace. If a project ends up in Apache it feels to me like it has gone out to pasture.
1. https://projects.apache.org/projects.html
[+] [-] brand|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giamma|2 years ago|reply
There are still a lot of projects at Apache.
Check their last annual report [1], especially the sponsors and the statistics sections.
[1] https://apache.org/foundation/docs/FY2023AnnualReport.pdf
[+] [-] ianburrell|2 years ago|reply
Apache also has a lot of dead projects that never got picked up by users. Apache should have a marker for zombie projects so people don't start using them.
[+] [-] indymike|2 years ago|reply
There are many Apache Foundation projects that are active and important or complete and important.
Unfortunately OpenOffice is not any of the above, and it was that way almost from the beginning. The original OO community largely went with LibreOffice. They did not like the interference of Oracle and later IBM in their project's governance. So, Apache got the trademarks from Oracle and a community of people who were largely not maintainers. This put Apache, almost from day one, in position to be competing with the community of one of their own projects.
[+] [-] geertj|2 years ago|reply
It's a bit too strong as others have pointed out that there are very active projects under the Apache umbrella. But I do feel that there's a core of truth in this. Specifically, Apache does appear to provide a "way out" for large enterprise customers that want to dump non-strategic (to them) code somewhere and not necessarily invest in it. Seems something that could be solvable on the ASF side by having additional criteria before accepting projects, and maybe require a certain level of activity for continued membership.
[+] [-] talent_deprived|2 years ago|reply
Fortunately many of us in the world disagree with the dystopian warped view.
[+] [-] JoshuaRogers|2 years ago|reply
While I do love the preservation aspect of it, seeing that a project is maintained by Apache rings the same "Sure, but is the project already dead" bells in my head that I hear when I see a project from Google. In both cases, the name brings the concern that a project might be on its way out.
[+] [-] AndyMcConachie|2 years ago|reply
Of course some of their projects die. That's OSS. But that's not something you can solve for. Even paid software goes away after awhile.
[+] [-] no_wizard|2 years ago|reply
If you do a lot of development in the JVM ecosystem though you’ll find there’s a lot of ASF projects that are actively used and maintained
[+] [-] wiremine|2 years ago|reply
Some projects are going to die, and I don't think that's the fault of the organization behind it. I'd love to see a more detailed analysis of all the current projects at Apache, and their growth/decline, and a breakdown of _why_ they're growing or declining. Maybe Apache is the problem, maybe it isn't.
[+] [-] pjmlp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cameldrv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MPSimmons|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ea1k|2 years ago|reply
Sometimes it is the place projects go when their original author wants to kill them but doesn't want to say they are doing that.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] giamma|2 years ago|reply
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.
Sun indeed had largely reduced its involvement in the project in the last years, and there was the "Symphony incident" [1]. The death blow was when Oracle arrived, started the trial with Google over Java/Android, inherited MySQL and almost killed it, inherited OpenOffice and the future did not look bright anymore [2, in German]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130927072255/https://lwn.net/A...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20131024094250/http://www.heise....
[+] [-] jonathaneunice|2 years ago|reply
If the OpenOffice kerfuffles weren't sapping enough energy out of the ecosystem, that users could suddenly use free, no-install-ever, not-equivalent-but-still-fine online tools did the rest.
Used to be an enthusiastic OpenOffice and LibreOffice user and developer—not of the core tools, but as part of bigger document processing and publishing workflows. Even presented at the OpenOffice Conference in 2007 (Moit de gust, Barcelona!) But after Google Docs, Sheets, etc. ... have not needed OpenOffice or LibreOffice nor used them in anger for over a decade.
[+] [-] znpy|2 years ago|reply
I mean... can you blame them? I would have forked too, if anything out of caution. The lawnmower has no feeling.
[+] [-] red_trumpet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mekster|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yrro|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tombert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbhdc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jszymborski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IseardMi|2 years ago|reply
https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/d2a7b3cc90e95392...
[+] [-] jroseattle|2 years ago|reply
The trunk branch, the Bugzilla list, the OS/2 support, the user forums, the multi-hour build process, the XHTML 1.0 compliant badge on the https://www.openoffice.org/ homepage .....
Reminds me of the good old days.
[+] [-] cratermoon|2 years ago|reply
Many years ago I became proficient with the Linux kernel build process, and later regularly built Mozilla with my preferred configuration and so forth. Both processes take some doing. I thought building OpenOffice couldn't be much of a challenge, it wasn't an operating system after all. I can't recall if I ever got it done. If I did, it was certainly the most vanilla possible build, taking all the defaults for a bog-standard build.
[+] [-] smrtinsert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garganzol|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sparrc|2 years ago|reply
2. What has the author done to engage so far? Has Apache responded to their emails? Have they opened any threads in chat forums?
3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just being minimally kept alive?
[+] [-] BitPirate|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dale_glass|2 years ago|reply
First, I don't understand what's the ASF'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?
And given the licensing allows, why don't they rebrand LibreOffice, rather than keeping a zombie of a project?
Or why don't they just make some sort of deal with LibreOffice?
[+] [-] einstand|2 years ago|reply
Board reports (including project reports) are open (with 1-2 month delay, they are published only after approval, at the next Board Meeting).
You can find the report of OpenOffice project here: https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/OpenOffice.html
ps: just adding here as an additional source, I couldn't really judge the situation...
ps2: BTW, I think it's very interesting to read these project reports...
[+] [-] purpleidea|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Twirrim|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KirillPanov|2 years ago|reply
wat.
[+] [-] shaftoe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tactician_mark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeinbu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zellyn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phendrenad2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvilka|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yankput|2 years ago|reply
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…)
edit: ugh fixed the company name. sorry
[+] [-] ghusto|2 years ago|reply
Latest commit:
https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/ce48dd1f26396c7a...
Can you spot the change?
Just because the software doesn't have massive changes (that nobody asked for anyway), doesn't mean it's unmaintained.
[+] [-] phendrenad2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prataapms|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nologic01|2 years ago|reply
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.
Developing an open source "office suite" that is ready for the next decade of ubiquitous ML/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.
[+] [-] unixhero|2 years ago|reply