Re: [libreoffice-users] Goodbye to Open Office (maybe?)

On 03/09/2016 11:50, CVAlkan wrote:

> Is this a case of "Where there's smoke ..."

Pretty much since AOo entered the Apache fold, it has had problems.
Some were major, such as no release manager for months. Some were minor,
such as an inability to produce documentation.

As far as actual retirement goes, and being kicked into the Attic goes.
That won't happen this year.

However, the following quotes from https://db.apache.org/newproject.html
apply to all Apache Projects, especially podlings:
* «Orphaned products. Products which have lost their corporate sponsor
(for whatever reason) do not make good candidates. These products will
lack a development community and won't have the support needed to
succeed under the DB umbrella»;
* «Reliance on salaried developers. DB has strong ties to the business
community. Many of our developers are encouraged by their employers to
work open source projects as part of their regular job. We feel that
this is a Good Thing, and corporations should be entitled to contribute
to open source, same as anyone else. However, we are wary of products
which rely strongly on developers who only work on open source products
when they are paid to do so. A product at DB must continue to exist
beyond the participation of individual volunteers. We believe the best
indicator of success is when developers volunteer their own time to work
open source projects.»

When AOo went into incubation at AFS, it was an orphaned project, with
an over-reliance of paid developers from IBM. When IBM pulled the plug
on AOo development, AOo development came to standstill.
As such, the long term prognosis of AOo is not good.

Gilles wrote:

> Apache has taken an unreasonable amount of time to clean up all the
code - in particular licenses

The initial code clean up was specifically to verify the providence of
each line of code:
* That the line of code was correctly licensed;
* That The Apache Software Foundation had the legal right to use the code;
* That The Apache Software Foundation had the moral right to use the code;
This type of code verification always takes a long time --- as in one
hour per line of code.

The net result is that if there are any legal challenges to the code,
ASF can say: "Here is the code in question, and here is our legal right
to use the code".

Two things that the code clean up did not do were:
* Identify algorithms that might infringe upon existing patents. Under
current US Patent Law, this is extremely counter-productive;
* Identify algorithms that infringe upon copyright, as defined in Oracle
v. Google, (United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit,
2013-1021, 1022, Decided: May 9, 2014. SCOTUS 14-410 2015-06-29 Petition
Denied.){In fairness to ASF, this definition of copyright was
unexpected. IMNSHO, it was an incredibly bad decision on the part of the
court --- on a par with the Appellate Court ruling that if you buy a DVD
in Colorado, you buy the copyright for the DVD.

> It would be a good thing FOR EVERYBODY if Apache decided to officially
call it quits on OOo,

Right now, there are a dozen things that AOo can do, that LibO can't do.
These are features and functions that LibO, for various reasons, has
deliberately chosen to not provide. Over time, the number of unique
functions for each program (AOo, EO, LibO, NO) to increase.

> I'll let you imagine the number of unpatched vulnerabilities inside)..

The next release of AOo will fix a known security exploit.  I don't know
if that is the one that is in the wild, or not.

###

ODF_Tools has tried to go the Attic on two separate occasions, but
hasn't gotten there yet.

jonathon

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