
Waiting for Apache Open Office - dankohn1
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/729460/ad130bc79f387e7e/
======
mcbits
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.

~~~
captainmuon
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.

~~~
mcbits
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.

~~~
chris_wot
License terms don't lie at the core of Libreoffice's identity...

------
jonotime
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
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.

~~~
jonotime
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?

------
chris_wot
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.

~~~
mindcrime
_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
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.

------
davidgerard
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...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/apache_openoffice_not_dead_yet/)
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/msg31399.html) [http://www.mail-
archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg314...](http://www.mail-
archive.com/dev@openoffice.apache.org/msg31400.html)

~~~
hdhzy
> 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.

~~~
izzard
@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.

~~~
hdhzy
Yes, I've verified that this fixes the issue. I'm using Intel drivers FWIW.

~~~
chris_wot
We might need to add your driver to the blacklist. What do you use exactly?

------
0x0
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...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/apache_openoffice_not_dead_yet/)

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...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150429084734/https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html)
) and while multiple snapshots have been captured since (
[http://web.archive.org/web/20150501000000*/https://www.openo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150501000000*/https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html)
) 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...](http://web.archive.org/web/20151101015732/https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html)
). 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...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150924061922/https://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2015-1774.html)
)

------
frik
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.

~~~
Jedd
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.

~~~
newscracker
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".

~~~
Jedd
Thank you. I possibly should have augmented with a comment around how I think
trying to re-re-name LibreOffice back to OpenOffice would be a bad idea.

Even though I'm one of the minority that understands the nature of the fork,
and the current status of both projects, as some LO developers have noted here
it would not be palatable to some of them to try to flip back to 'OpenOffice'
as a project name. I don't believe educating users of OpenOffice about the
name change is an intractable problem, but, again as some LO contributors have
noted here, it's not necessarily LO's role to do this, nor is it something
they necessarily _could_ do. But it _is_ something the AOO team could do, and,
as per TFA, it's probably now the right thing to do.

------
CJefferson
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
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.

~~~
CJefferson
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.

~~~
lfam
Pretty much all free and open source software licenses specifically say there
is no warranty at all.

 _All_ non-trivial software has security bugs. To reiterate, every program
you've ever heard of has had and will have serious security bugs. If no bugs
have been published, then either nobody is looking or someone is keeping them
secret.

I agree that Apache has behaved irresponsibly.

~~~
votepaunchy
Apache has a process for retiring inactive top-level and incubator projects.
It's not immediate but it does happen quite often.

~~~
tialaramex
Indeed it does. That's the process which was mooted last September.

However contributors _and Apache Board Members_ chimed in to announce that
Apache OpenOffice was healthy and would continue. They managed, weeks laters,
to spit out a release containing almost literally just one bug fix and then
nothing since. So long as Board Members pretend everything is fine the Apache
process won't trigger. This has become about the ego of Board Members versus
the interests of the wider community.

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

~~~
zokier
Interesting tidbit about the meta here:

\------

> > 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.

\-------

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

~~~
mindcrime
_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.

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

[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/openoffice-dev/2017...](http://mail-
archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/openoffice-
dev/201708.mbox/%3CEE94F650-28AA-4DB1-BB74-5377A3914750%40jaguNET.com%3E)

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
> 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?

~~~
mindcrime
_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.

~~~
jancsika
If OpenOffice cannot get _security fixes_ in a timely manner and the site is
still getting a substantial number of monthly downloads, wouldn't you agree
that the ethical move would be to display a prominent link to an actively
maintained open source alternative to the software on the Apache OpenOffice
frontpage?

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

------
sgs1370
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?)

------
w8rbt
Why did they fork?

~~~
geodel
Oracle Copyrights etc.

~~~
TallGuyShort
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](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_wot
Actually, it's more complicated than that. It's not entirely Oracle's fault -
Sun made third party developers' lives very painful and wouldn't accept
patches without an enormous amount of red tape. They essentially caused the
split when Michael Meeks was forced to create the Go-OO fork where he produced
a build that merged in a huge number of patches that were backlogged from the
main tree.

When OpenOffice pushed back (and after they completely shafted Kohei's effort
in contributing a solver for Calc) they in essence told the wider development
community that their contributions weren't welcome and forced the creation of
The Document Foundation to govern the development of LibreOffice. The TDF then
worked out how to be welcoming, lowered barriers to entry for new contributors
massively, put in infrastructure like gerrit and opengrok, majorly simplified
the build process and generally showed a lot of love to their developers. At
this point it was game over for Apache OpenOffice, and now everyone
contributes their code to LibreOffice. Which is an utter no-brainer really -
why send your code to a bunch of people who arrogantly think your efforts are
by default crap as you have no experience with the codebase?

~~~
TallGuyShort
Thanks for the added detail - but I didn't mean to assign blame to Oracle or
oversimplify it. I'm just saying AOO isn't a fork motivated by Oracle
copyrights as stated in the posts I was replying to. LibreOffice would more
correctly be called the fork, and copyright really wasn't the motivation.

~~~
chris_wot
All good :-) LO is definitely a fork, and licensing was indeed a big issue,
there is just quite a bit of history that led up to the fork, which happened
before Oracle donated their code and trademark to the Apache Foundation.

It's frankly all kind of old news for most LO devs. We're far more interested
in improving LO and competing against our real rival, which is Microsoft.
Every now and then someone might make a small comment about AOO, but we don't
encourage a lot of criticism of AOO because we have enough to do than spend
any effort on ill-will towards Apache. We want to drive positive change and
win by being awesome, not "win" through negativity :-)

~~~
TallGuyShort
Being that you're a LO contributor, then - thank you for your work! I use
LibreOffice all the time and it's replaced Microsoft at the home of virtually
every friend and relative who comes to me for tech support. I'm yet to hear of
any problems using it from any of them.

