The Apache Software Foundation offers a suite of office productivity software named Apache Open Office. Based on the download page, you would never guess the last major release of the software was made available in 2014.
With that bit of release history in mind, would it be fair to consider Apache Open Office as an un-maintained project? In this blog post, I share a quick recap of the history behind Apache Open Office, and my opinion on why The Apache Software Foundation’s actions may be masking the answer to this question.
I get it that the project isn't getting work done on features, but it bothers me how the author tried to criticize basic code quality improvements such as fixing typos. I don't know if the author is an active contributor to the project, but I think he shouldn't really be criticizing the ones that actually contribute, wether their contributions are big or small.
The commit history I looked through has multiple commits for something that should realistically be a single “linted the project” commit. It’s valid criticism in this case.
I don't agree. The trunk features multiple typo fixes and whatnot, but they are days apart and spread over weeks on end.
If anything, this shows that no one is contributing to the project, and people like the blogger wasted more effort writing posts on how no one is doing anything while they themselves do nothing at all, and to make matters worse they criticise the ones actually contributing something.
If the blogger really feels strongly about this, he should put their money where their mouth is and lead by example.
I’m sorry, which of those recent commits aren’t things a single linter run would catch? You had me second-guessing myself until I went through, again, a ton of diffs that just fix spacing, remove trailing whitespace, and basic typos things like CSpell can catch.
For example, the most recent commit as of writing has this: https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/0c72d66f1a33589bfa5729d3fc3bdd5e807826ac#diff-1ce22feeb294b6917e38bda4906aed35e50ac4828688ffc5ad370256524731bf
A commit from months ago has this: https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/5b179f6267cea1575fe6248ab8507bf7144666a0#diff-91750778c26e06764cafa81d4adfbf264acfa159addece80f61d4782dcb7f73c
These are the same fix on different files in different commits. That’s a linting problem that should be handled in a single commit (possibly a massive squashed PR), not something that should be drip-fed for months.
Ask yourself why the code still had those typos, and why nobody did anything about it except the guy contributing code cleanup commits.
So you want me to invest my time adding basic contributor functionality to a project that’s been around for than a decade? A project that’s been on life support for some time and doesn’t compete with its successor (who does use basic CI tools, I might add)? A project with, if GitHub is to be believed, has one active contributor and has struggled to keep contributors since 2013?
Both the original author and I are claiming it’s time for Apache to move on. In 2023 this major project still hasn’t implemented basic toolchain fundamentals. I have yet to see you offer anything more than “open source is hard” which I don’t think the original author disagrees with. I certainly don’t. I also don’t think it’s wise to hop on a project of this scale with this complete lack of contribution flow. Unless you’ve got a good reason why all of these good folks here should, you still haven’t addressed the core problem brought up by the original author or answered my concerns about drip feeding things that tooling should be taking care of.
I don't want you to do anything, but I'm not the one wasting my time complaining over how others contribute to FLOSS projects. If you feel entitled to complain about other people's contributions, in the very least you need to put your money where your mouth is.
I do. I put my time where it is best served and makes a difference. That’s not this project. Not every open source project survives. That’s how it works. You make value judgements like the one the original author made that you still have nothing to say about. Your only point continues to be “you don’t get to complain unless you commit” which has been addressed multiple times by “this is not a good project to commit on.” This is a one-sided conversation.
But why do you care that someone else actually is commiting though?
But why care? Open source work is volunteer work. I'm not saying it is above criticism, but if truly the only people willing and wanting to work on the project want to make the commits like that as opposed to a single one, who cares? If you strongly believe in topics like this and want to work on the project then go help them out. But like I said, if the only people who actually want to work on the project want to work on it like that, then who cares?
Does Apache have incentive for the project to seem alive when it isn't? Maybe? I don't know. Do I think they're trying to make it look alive? I feel pretty strongly they aren't.
It’s one thing to have a bunch of repos up that a couple of people are pushing around here and there. It’s a totally different thing for a major open source presence to prop up a project instead of retiring it. This isn’t some random project; it’s run by a major org, doesn’t have good contribution flows, and has been struggling since 2013.
There was a security fix in February of 2023. I don't think no releases for six months warrants going there.