Hey I saw the bugzilla thread and thought I'd share some info; There have been 3 attempts by Apache and OpenOffice members in the past couple years to do a dignified retirement before the code rot creates an unusable state for AOO and it becomes an embarrassment for the FOSS community. The most recent was by David Hamilton, the previous PM. There was some serious discussion around this until some people decided that they'd rather go down with the ship due to long standing grudges against people at The Document Foundation. (Really petty imo) The only reason AOO still exists is a community of people who ideologically believe that GPL/LO is bad and unrestrictive licenses are great. Nothing wrong with that, just very inefficient use of people's time. There are 4 consumer friendly, actively developed open source office suites in the market today: Abiword/Gnumeric, Libreoffice, Calligra, and OnlyOffice. OnlyOffice and Libreoffice are actively pursuing cloud integration with cloud hosting providers (nextcloud, file cloud (proprietary), Seafile, Pydio, etc.). OnlyOffice was opensourced in 2015, and was built using a HTML5 and JavaScript base. It's probably going to be the new popular kid on the block for open source office software. The people who worked at Sun that still want to work on OOo now work on the Libreoffice code. LO code is literally years ahead in coding development, refactoring, rewriting, etc. You won't get them back. Google Fuzz identified 33 bugs in LO code and suggested a quarter of them were security vulnerabilities. It's likely that AOO has these vulnerabilities too but they won't be fixed. Most AOO volunteers arrive, see the state of the project and then drift off to projects with larger communities. Large tech companies don't see a need to invest in desktop only technology, if anything there will be more use of MPL licensed LO or OnlyOffice (new OO) as companies like Collabora already have sales account managers and developers making it an option for companies and governments wanting to stay away from MS. TDF donations go directly and solely to LO project management and volunteer recruitment. There's a recent blog post on their planet that talks about how they use donated funds to fix things volunteers never would find interesting. AOO never received funds directly, only to the Apache Project. Apache distributes to what they think is important, and right now that is big data. This is unfair but not illogical. There hasn't been a significant release in AOO for a few years now, only minor bug fixes. Old people like it because it works the same way it has for the 6 years. However there are significant security risks to using AOO. It's a great accomplishment of OOo that the brand has embedded into tech culture that people use the name when they think free office suite. But there won't be any new development on the project. There are too many new FOSS projects out there solving the same problems that AOO wants to solve, and the AOO demographic is getting smaller every month. Windows S will likely initiate a huge drop in CNET downloads and there will be a shift to LO over the next few years as they adopt more MS features. If AOO wanted to survive as a project it would need to not be under the Apache Foundation, or there would need to be a company willing to spend money redoing everything what LO has done. But they won't, because even LO has competitors that do Base better (Kexi), Draw better (Inkscape), Impress better (Prezi, etc.). TDF realises this and they've focused on writer, calc, and impress in the cloud. They'll likely be able to continue because of the community support, but I see OnlyOffice taking the FOSS crown. AOO? Maybe a Shuttleworth will bankroll developers? But why wouldn't he start from scratch with all the code rot? LO still hasn't finished translating the german comments and they've been working on it for years. i guess if you posted it all on Github devs might take notice? I'm writing this as an appeal to take a mature response to the state of your project. You have huge branding power and millions of older people use your project. It's dangerous for these people to continue using your software when it's susceptible to exploits that won't be fixed anytime soon. Please inform them as to the state of your project instead of pretending everything is hunky dory. When LO releases their Google Fuzz code fixes hackers will compare the changes to your code and people will have identity theft, lose files, etc. Just so you guys can say: "oh, you suck LO, our ideology is better!" Meanwhile people are comparing OnlyOffice to Libreoffice when they look at FOSS office software.
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