The worst thing about this was that openoffice was starting to get some name recognition before oracle killed it, and this whole debacle intentionally or unintentionally turned that name recognition into a weapon against LibreOffice.
Ideally they should have given LibreOffice the OpenOffice name, but even if they had just said "openoffice is dead" then it would have been easy for people to find libreoffice.
Unfortunately, by taking over the OpenOffice name and absolutely refusing to admit that development has ceased, Apache has caused tons of confusion that has massively harmed libreoffice, because for years people who had heard about "openoffice" would see the terrible, out of date, insecure pile of junk being distributed by the Apache Foundation and not realize that the actively developed LibreOffice was available.
In the case of linux distributions it was less of an issue since they just switched to LibreOffice, but I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice (and possibly taking one look at it and giving up and switching to Office 365).
Apache should have killed OpenOffice years ago but at the very least they should take it down and honestly apologize for fucking this up so badly.
Even ignoring the harm to LibreOffice it's just irresponsible for Apache to keep distributing OpenOffice when they can't even make new releases to simply apply security patches for years.
Yeah, that was me, I totally downloaded it as the first thing when setting up a new computer for years. I thought the errors opening some excel documents was because it was open source. Little did I know it was effectively abandonware.
Meh, I guess it's all subjective, but OpenOffice has a certain alliterative, authoritative-sounding ring to it. The name LibreOffice feels clunky & hokey in comparison. It's a bummer that the latter wasn't able to adopt the branding of the former.
According to my dictionary, the pronunciation of "libretto" (an imported, but already established English word) in IPA is [lɪbr'etoʊ]. We can extrapolate from this.
It would lead to that pronunciation as English likes its schwas and disappearing schwas, just like French does. (Someone else pointed out that "swallowed" schwa is closer to the French pronunciation, too.)
I've lived in parts of the country where "libre" and its counterpart "gratis" were somewhat more common English vocabulary words, and their pronunciations were much more in line with "rhymes with zebra" (LEEB-ruh) and "rhymes with lattice" (GRAH-tuhs). To be fair, those were parts of the country with a bit of a "South midwestern" drawl and some might take those to be lower class, "less educated" pronunciations, but they certainly sounded a lot more like the natural pronunciations of such words in English to me.
Even for monolingual English speakers, like myself, it only takes two or three braincells to make a guess that "libre" comes from a Romance language and probably relates to the word liberty. That gets you close enough to understand the sentiment behind the name LibreOffice.
I don't think the Libre name is a problem at all. It's just one of those things people too cynically think will be a problem for other people. The real problem for LibreOffice was losing all the brand recognition OpenOffice managed to accrue in the years before everything went to shit.
I don't quite agree. It's not so much the meaning as the ease of use that's the problem. You don't need to have any worries about pronouncing, nor spelling, OpenOffice correctly. You can tell somebody about it without going through the whole "Huh? That's how you say it? Are you sure that's right? How do you spell it again?" routine.
I'm not saying it's the whole story, or even the biggest part of it. But it adds a bit of friction to getting the word around about the new name. See uBlock Origin for a more successful example, where the mere mention of uBlock had, and still does to an extent, "you mean Origin, right?" as a default, low-effort response.
I don't know if the French would approve of that pronunciation, but it's good enough for me and seems like an intuitively obvious way for me to pronounce it. The word looks obviously French, and monolingual English speakers encounter French-looking words often enough that it doesn't give many people pause. Just pronounce it like it was English and put on a fake French accent if you want to get fancy with it.
I won't say there is zero friction from the word Libre, but it's certainly much smaller than losing all the built-up brand recognition of OpenOffice, and even that is much smaller than the elephant in the room: the ubiquity of Microsoft Office and the trouble any competitor will have no matter what name is used.
I think people fixate on the name because that's the easiest thing to change. But changing the name would only make things worse, by once again wiping out all accrued brand recognition. Even if you ignore that and want to talk about a hypothetical situation where it was named something else originally, the project would obviously still be an obscure oddity in the global Microsoft monoculture.
> I don't know if the French would approve of that pronunciation, but it's good enough for me and seems like an intuitively obvious way for me to pronounce it.
I say it the same way.
Here's the catch: if you pronounce it at someone as a recommendation i.e. "you should try Libreoffice!", how likely are they to remember it when they get home, or to be able to spell it to search for it?
Like 1 Billion people in the world are native spanish or french speakers and understand libre verbatim. Add to that most people speaking a latin language will also understand it despite the slight difference in spelling. Most people speaking english know the word liberty and those that have an IQ higher than an oyster do figure it out easily.
Additionally you don't have to have a connection for a name to work. I mean there are a lot of software used by millions of people without them never ever thinking why they are called like that.
People in this thread, so technical people, who already have an interest in OpenOffice / LibreOffice, are saying they don't even know how to pronounce it!
I think crowdsourcing a name by polling the public will get you something like OfficeMcOfficeFace, and that is if you are lucky. So if this is your roundabout way of pointing out that the name could be even worse, well played.
Yup. When I hear OpenOffice I think of something professional. When I hear "libreOffice" I think of the Adwattia icon set and gnome crashing because of some broken default.
I don't know why you're downvoted. LibreOffice is the superior product and perfectly good, but this is a perfect expression of the mental image the two names evoke.
The actual quality of the software is a seperate issue. I didn't interpret your comment as attacking the software. The office sofware anyway! :)
One of the problems with OpenOffice was/is that it's a trademark in Brazil and the Netherlands. I don't know much about the Brazilian case, but in the Dutch case it's a small IT consultancy focusing on Linux and other Open Source stuff. Especially given they operate in the same kind of space that OpenOffice.org (the office suite) it's led to some amount of confusion.
It might be that - Libre seems to sound or feel more like "free". Where "Open" feels like corporate BS, maybe even worse like corporate BS that some crushed soul came up with.
There's no accounting for taste, but if past threads on the topic are to be believed, there is not even a consensus on how it's pronounced. That alone makes it a highly questionable product name.
I can only imagine this is split between those who (correctly) think it's pronounced "Lee-bra"[1] (like Libra the star sign) or "Lie-bra"[1] (like fibre).
I can't imagine how on earth it would be possible to be so unaware of other languages that one could even arrive at the second option.
You've found a pronunciation that I've never heard a single person use (your confidently "correct" one.) The second one, "lee-burr", I've heard. "Lee-bray" is nearly correct if you think it's from Spanish, and "Lee-bruh" is nearly correct if you think it's from French, where the "a" is a schwa (ə), not a "short a."
I had forgotten about Spanish pronunciation (more like "Lee-br-eh" than "Lee-br-ay" if memory serves correctly, but was about 35 years since doing a couple of years of Spanish in school so I won't be nearly as over-confident).
I was thinking of French and meant "the "a" is a schwa (ə)" when erroneously calling it a "short a", I never know the correct names for the different vowel sounds.
I'm really not sure how you arrived at "a pronunciation that I've never heard a single person use". I may have used wildly incorrect terminology, but given the star sign example I'm curious how you pronounce Libra that is so wildly different from "Lee-bruh" (being a reasonable approximation of French "libre")?
As has been mentioned, libre is also a Spanish word, and an anglicised pronunciation derived from Spanish would be something like 'lee-bray' (although of course the last vowel isn't a diphthong in Spanish).
Speaking purely based on the name, not the actual software:
What comes to mind when I hear the name LibreOffice is historically mediocre FOSS that you'd only choose for ideological reasons, which is why the libre part needs to be advertised up front. When I imagine what it looks like, I'm imagining some creaky UI that looks like GIMP from 1999. It's worse, even, than OpenOffice, because OpenOffice is the obvious name if you're going for the ideological angle, which suggests that LibreOffice is a shitty knockoff of a shitty knockoff. Honestly even StarOffice is more appealing to my ears.
I'm positive that all of this is deeply unfair, but that's what comes to mind. Part of the negativity probably relates to conflating LibreOffice and OpenOffice in my head.
> because OpenOffice is the obvious name if you're going for the ideological angle
I disagree. I associate "Open" with corporate-interest driven "open source", BSD licensing, and cynically misleading branding (OpenDNS). 'Open' is the word you use if specifically don't want to invoke GNUy left-adjacent ideologies.
Freeoffice as a name is a bit reminiscent of the junkware you used to get on discs with magazines.
I wonder what the modern equivalent is, probably the websites that show up in results if you google for US free tax software or video conversion tools that are just bad ad-filled guis around ffmpeg probably.
Maybe call it something other than "X"Office? The names are too few and too generic to be a meaningful distinguisher, IMO. It's like how every hobby assembly is <letter>asm. Slapping "free/open/libre" in front of a generic word has limits.
> I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice
It gets about 235,000 downloads/week, most of which are for Windows.[1] It doesn't seem SourceForge shows the absolute number of downloads, and while ~235k/week isn't a huge huge number, it's still pretty significant. Dunno how this compares to LibreOffice or other software packages (e.g. Firefox).
> I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice
I'm far away and can't help my parents.
They recently replaced their computer and asked a local tech to reinstall their apps. I told them to ask for LibreOffice. The guy put OpenOffice...
Saw openoffice on a friend of my father's laptop a while back. it had a 4k screen and OO did not support it, causing every pixel to be 4x the size of other applications, it looked really awful. I told him to download libreoffice instead and that openoffice was not being developed anymore. He thanked me and told me that he had been annoyed by how awful it looks.
I bet if I polled friends and family the ones who know the name OpenOffice would outnumber the ones who know LibreOffice 2:1. And it's only that favorable for LibreOffice because I know quite a few other computer nerds.
I really don't understand why Apache doesn't just put the OpenOffice branding on LibreOffice. Is there any real reason to not just make OpenOffice a branded distribution of LibreOffice at this point?
edit: oh right, licenses. LibreOffice is MPL, and the Apache Foundation won't touch it.
> I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice
I wouldn't be surprised if as many or more Windows users were downloading it than downloading Libreoffice. The problem is that the name isn't punchy and is unpronounceable in English. Plenty of people who are completely knowledgeable about the situation still refer to Libreoffice as Openoffice.
It's intentional sabotage, more than probably covertly initiated and maintained by Microsoft, and destroyed the entire Apache Foundation for me. I avoid all of their projects, because if that project has a commercial competitor with deep pockets, I can't trust it not to be intentionally bad or broken.
The commenter is right to the point. Look at the sponsors of Apache foundation, and you'll see that Google and Microsoft appear as some of the largest contributers. Of course they don't want to antagonize these companies.
The best way to look at Apache and simular foundations is as infrastructure maintained by big companies to redirect open source effort to their goals. They use third parties to do this because the companies themselves enjoy very little trust from the open source community.
The Apache Foundation has next to zero input into how any of the projects are run, so even if this were true it would be irrelevant. How exactly do you imagine this influence working? It would have to be quite overt to have any effect on so many projects that are self organising.
No evidence, but that doesn't mean that they're unfounded, that means that they're unproven. There's only one party that profits from the confusion, and it's a party that spent a fortune on bribes (or "grants" or whatever) during the OOXML debacle.
...I'm a native english speaker and I've never had trouble pronouncing libre, is it a problem for others? I've always said "lib-ray", which for all I know is wrong, I never gave it a second thought.
"unpronounceable" is technically hyperbole, but the point is true. It's just an annoying speedbump both reading and speaking. Actually more so in writing than speaking.
Speaking, I don't bother to even try to be technically correct, I just say leebruhoffice. It's honestly about exactly as fast and easy as openoffice, but 1, it's only made equivalent by being wrong and sloppy. 2 still the mental process of reading it is just, more work, somehow.
The name just isn't as good at what good names are good at. It's ok. It's accurate. But it's not good. It's just annoying to crank out and stumble over in a way that neither StarOffice or OpenOffice are. NeoOffice is good on those fronts but is bad simply because the word neo is too I don't know, stupid. I can't take anything seriously that calls itself neosomething. "Drive the new neorunner..." pass.
yeah, plus if you tell someone to "download libreoffice", there's a good chance the thing they're going to type into google is going to be something misspelled.
having watched Nacho Libre (Jack Black's "sport" comedy) many years ago, and laughing hysterically all the way through, I have no problems with the Libre part.
I'm a native French speaker and when speaking English, I just say "Office" because LibreOffice sounds weird. And for similar reasons, I never say "I used The Gimp". I do very much appreciate both projects. Naming is hard.
To me (another native english speaker) it's not that pronouncing "libre" is hard, but that then combining it with "office" makes for a clunky awkward mouthful. Whereas "open" and "office" flowed together quite well.
That's a perfectly fine pronunciation, but the point is that it's not an English word, so plenty of people will think it looks weird or not know how to pronounce it.
> but if you're curious, the Spanish pronounciation is "li"- as in "list" or "ligament"
This is... not correct. Spanish pronunciation would be LEE-bray. The "li" is similar to "bLEEd". And for proper style points make sure to flip the "r".
I'm honestly having a hard time listening to the difference between English "li" and "lee". If you mean how "lee" tends to hold the vowel for longer, maybe you're indicating that that syllable holds the phonetic accent in "libre", which you'd be right about. Fundamentally though, they sound the same.
I usually pronounce it like 'lee-bur', though at times I've tried a more French version which is closer to 'lee-bruh' but it doesn't flow nicely into 'office'. Hearing 'lib-ray/lee-bray'/'lib-er' (like liberty) I would know what you mean though.
This just means it has ambiguous pronunciation, and there are many things like that. It's not "unpronounceable". Something unpronounceable to an English speaker would be something like words using a non-latin character set or words using latin characters in long or unfamiliar ways like random Finnish words or some words resulting from trying to romanize another language.
we had some people at work running a copy of librespeed, and they kept pronouncing libre as LEE-BER I had to correct them once a week for 2 months before they got it.
IANAL, but the license includes both a a disclaimer of warranty and a limitation of liability. Further I think to sue you need to demonstrate actual harm. Absent a security breach, for which you might get a day in court, they haven't harmed you.
Stop using their software. Stop bullying people with lawyers.
There are plenty of jurisdictions where such a disclaimer is void. France, for example, probably. Or anyway somewhere in Europe.
News that Apache had been forbidden to perform downloads to France, and then more places, might help raise awareness that it shouldn't be downloaded at all, nohow.
Maybe it would even push Apache to stop offering it entirely, and to link to the Libreoffice site instead.
> There are plenty of jurisdictions where such a disclaimer is void. France, for example, probably
I would be surprised, as such disclaimers are included in the official French flavor of the GPL family (http://cecill.info/licences.fr.html); section 8.2.
I would assume that the disclaimer protects the copyright holder but not the distributor.
The European approach to consumer protections is generally more about ensuring that things are safe by default than about warnings and disclaimers. A lot depends on the expected competence of the target audience. If you distribute professional tools directly to professionals, they can be expected to read the warnings and understand that misuse could be dangerous. If you market and distribute something to the general public, ensuring safety is your responsibility.
I see downvotes, but there is a difference between "our stuff has a bug" and "we're actively keeping this project alive, including updating binary downloads, even though we know it has endless CVEs, some of them years old."
One is an innocent problem. The other is willful negligence.
And we need to start suing for this sort of thing. We need fines for companies willingly causing harm.
rm will unapologetically delete files instead of using the "trash bin" semantics that many people are used to. Some would define that as "faulty", and it can certainly cause "harm" (a "rm fuckup" is almost a rite of passage).
You can find many such almost banal examples, ranging from well-known tools to some project a student uploaded on GitHub that sees basically 0 traffic. Opening up Open Office to a lawsuit also means opening up countless GitHub projects from 15-year olds riddled with SQL injections and the like, but also things I put on my GitHub five years ago and don't really care about. Ignoring a PR would mean risking a lawsuit.
Plus, do we really want government involved in telling us what software we can and can't put on the internet? Because that's what this would mean.
"They should be sued for distributing outdated insecure software" is a fun one-liner, but the ramifications if it would actually happen are huge and almost entirely negative for the Open Source world.
I think you’d have at the very very least specify an actual harm against you, and even then you’d likely be told immediately that they have no obligation to provide anything given there’s no support contract.
I think the reason you’re getting downvotes is that Apache is a non profit foundation, not a for profit company. So fining them isn’t going to do a lot of good (as well as being very unlikely to succeed)
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
So, someone should put all of the free and open source software at risk (if the "we guarantee nothing" part of their license doesn't hold ground for them it holds ground for no one) because you want to attack the ASF for not doing what you want? What a great plan.
The mark of a good open source maintainer is the ability to, when your personal interest wanes, find a new maintainer and hand over.
I've done this several times, and certainly development went on much slower than before, but them's the breaks. At least I did the right thing.
For such a big organization, with so many open source projects under its big wing, Apache has failed on this mark of maintainership completely. It failed so badly that at this stage, deploying Apache-maintained software for a customer or employer is downright irresponsible.
Would you organize all your company's internal communications around Google's latest messaging thing? That's insane, you know it'll bite you in the ass in a few years time when it gets cancelled. Apache is no better.
The ASF is an umbrella organisation. For most projects the ASF’s involvement stretches only to procedures and structures for managing the project. The maintainers are mostly not even ASF Members (even those that steer projects). So, not much inference can be drawn from the failure of one project that applies to another.
Sounds like Oracle, with their behaviour with, well, everything all the time.
The whole OOo, mysqL, OEL junket within a span of a few years, made sure I'd never use them, ever, for anything.
These days, I think it's maybe in alignment with why nigerian style scam spam is always so poorly worded, and looks so obvious.
They want the easy marks. They want those not easily fooled, to not reply.
And so this is how I see Oracle, and their horrid, childish, terrible behaviour. The want to weed out anyone who senses the scam, be it licensing hell, or just horrid core/services.
Sadly, big corp and governments are slow to get the message, and I suspect more easily fleeced.
The amount of times I've heard of a CEO or CTO in big corp, buying a product without even talking to devs/IT?
> Did other languages handle it better? Is this a Java problem or is this a "Governments changing timezone information all the time is hard" problem?
Java is peculiarly annoying in that it doesn't use the normal tzdata database, it has its own copy of the database, with its own separate updating procedure. Even when it's the openjdk package on a Linux distribution, you often have a "tzdata" package (used by everything else) and a "tzdata-java" package (used exclusively for the JVM).
So yeah, cross platform is hard and this was their implementation of it? How do other languages handle this cross platform use case? I'm just being pragmatic here and less dogmatic. They chose to manage their own tz records so that the host is could be broken to high hell and theirs would still work. My assumption of this is having to support N different is and arch differences that made this non-trivial when they adopted it. Maybe now there are easier paths to take, so I suppose patches welcome?
Right, which is why I think it's a little crazy to talk about how litigious oracle is with Java when there's no major cases I can think of besides the google and microsoft cases.
It's been over 10 years, you'd think there'd be far more examples of bad behavior.
Since it's a database system it competes with Oracle's paid offerings and anyone aware of this conflict of interest has been waiting for them to hobble the product.
Now there is Mysql "enterprise edition" and "community edition" - but paying can open you to a license audit from Oracle. Savvy people just use MariaDB and avoid the whole mess.
I'm responding to a claim of "The whole OOo, mysqL, OEL junket...", and all you've got is to accuse Oracle of what they might do in the future? It's fine to hold a negative opinion of them because of what they might do, but I don't think it's fine to use MySQL as an example of something bad they've done already...because, as far as I can tell, they haven't.
> Savvy people just use MariaDB and avoid the whole mess.
A few years back, Oracle created OEL, that is, Oracle Enterprise Linux.
However all they did was to effectively clone Redhat's src rpms/repos, and call it a day.
Later, as their stuff was 100% identical, they just used redhat's rpms for security updates. Essentially, one paid corp contributing not a single thing, and completely and totally leeching off of redhat.
Redhat, whom they wanted to take market share from.
The next step was to aggressively market OEL, and of course claim that it was better. Of course Redhat did a sensible thing, and moved its security patches behind a wall, and required a subscription to get them. Subscriptions were free, but the terms meant Oracle couldn't just copy them. And of course, Oracle couldn't tell people to use Redhat's url/servers for updates on the OS they claim to have "created". Bad image, and all that.
Angry at the idea of having to manage their own security updates, and you know, do actual work, Oracle hid all security patches, and security update info for mysql.
This made it impossible for not just Redhat, but everyone (eg, debian) to backport security fixes.
And there is no equivalency here in Oracle's response. After all, Redhat security updates were created by bug reports about CVEs, and patches in software (eg, a ssh or apache patch), which Oracle could easily obtain and do themselves.
Instead, Oracle stopped communicating specifics about security issues, and providing any patches for security updates,
purposefully obscuring security fixes in massive single patches, with loads of other fixes and changes.
This is the reason the entire open source community embraced mariadb, everyone had no choice.
It is also the reason redhat threw money at centos, and essentially bought them. This allowed them to give security updates to centos directly.
All this because Oracle threw a temper tantrum, at not being able to build an entire OS, for free, and leech off of the company they wanted to take market share from.
Making it very difficult for people to manage deploying mysql, as well as making it hard for security researchers to audit change, and security updates, is a real problem.
But that's oracle for you. Buy something, mismanage it, lose market share like crazy, the only plus is, it is amusing to watch them fumble about I guess.
They basically bought something, then lost 99% of their market share. Essentially every linix distro dropped mysql. It is gone from redhat, gone from debian and all derivatives.
Mariadb, Monty or not, was just a startup when all this happened. They literally handed Monty billions on value.
Pathetic.
Meanwhile, so many changes in MySQL weren't even from Oracle after they bought it. Loads of stuff came from Percona. Massive code for 5.6.
> Essentially every linix distro dropped mysql. It is gone from redhat, gone from debian and all derivatives.
False. It's available in Ubuntu in the usual way. "apt install mysql-server" is all you need. Most of Ubuntu builds against MySQL, not MariaDB. MariaDB is also available.
As for the others, being removed from other distributions is hardly Oracle's doing.
> Meanwhile, so many changes in MySQL weren't even from Oracle after they bought it. Loads of stuff came from Percona. Massive code for 5.6.
I don't think this is true. For example, the replication in MySQL 8.0 is unique to MySQL. Many changes fix dubious design decisions from previous releases. Every release seems to be full of old ambigious or poorly engineered stuff being deprecated or removed.
It seems to me that you dislike Oracle because of what they did with other products, and are mistakenly blaming Oracle for mistreating MySQL but can't actually point to any MySQL specifics here. Please don't make your argument circular. If you don't want to touch MySQL because of other things that Oracle have done, then that's your choice. But putting MySQL itself in the list of things that Oracle is doing wrong doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
I do wish they had done the same with Solaris or ZFS. They could have at the stage given it a permissive license and then the community could have kept that or went to GPL and killed the whole CDDL/GPL debate, but now the non-Oracle-assigned changes are also under CDDL so that window has closed.
IBM was shipping their own proprietary office suite based on OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony, and LibreOffice wasn't a good fit for that business model. IBM was the leading charge behind Apache OpenOffice, Oracle would have rather dumpstered it.
I'd be surprised if the walking dead state of Open separate from Libre wasn't caused by in-house tools somewhere that just never got ported to Libre, or that are somehow inherently incompatible with that fork. Symphony is certainly a prime suspect for the original "version some in-house stuff got built on".
The question "do we really want to port yet another minor improvement/fix from Libre to Open instead of porting our own grown mess from Open to Libre?" can be answered with a short-sighted "yes, of course!" any number of times. And Open cannot be formerly declared dead as long as this form of contribution keeps happening.
IBM discontinued Lotus Symphony nearly 10 years ago. OpenOffice continues because the Apache project chairs in place hate the GPL, and even worse, they hate admitting they lost. It's a moral/pride thing rather than a practical or business thing at this point. But IBM was the reason it exists in the first place.
> OpenOffice continues because the Apache project chairs in place hate the GPL
LibreOffice isn't even GPL. It's Mozilla Public License (MPL). Still copyleft, but much more weakly so, because only MPL source files are required to stay MPL. You can mix MPL files with even proprietary source files, and you only have to distribute the changes to the original MPL files.
Though I suppose that might conflict with the Apache foundation in general. Don't they require Apache license for all their software?
Judging from the simplified fork graph in the article (likely greatly simplified, I admit), I'd expect something depending on Symphony to be far more compatible with current Open than with current Libre. But sure, the licencing difference might very well be a part of that.
What "business model"? IBM didn't charge for Symphony, and if you wanted to pay for support it was fantastically inexpensive. Even cheaper than I remembered, https://www.computerworld.com/article/2535199/ reports 20k users for $25k/year.
So what business model was libreoffice disrupting, exactly? Because IBM at the time was mostly driven by NIH syndrome rather than some 4d-chess anti-freedom scheming.
Besides OpenOffice, there is generally reduced downloads of both OpenOffice and LibreOffice. This is not surprising.
The world is moving past system-installed, standalone editors, saving them into a file and exchanging them over emails. The convenience that comes with editing, sharing and collaborating right from the browser is picking up speed, and it's a good thing. We have unlimited version history and the social features (comments, reactions and data tables, with ratings and upvotes as column types like in Coda / Notion) is unmatchable with what a traditional word processor can offer.
The world is evolving into a different future of Office apps and Apache's projects don't fit into that ecosystem.
It’s NOT a good thing. I want to own my documents and not have to worry about some cloud provider mining them to sell data about me, or just disappearing one day.
Sure I can see the cases where the collaboration is useful, but there are many, many more cases where it’s not needed and cloud introduces far more risk than reward.
It’s also hard to beat the UX available to native applications that are dedicated and purpose-built and locally processing rather than an interpreted language wrapped inside a web browser constantly communicating with a server somewhere as I type.
How many documents do you actually own, but still write them in a full-out word processor? Personally, if it's just for me, I use .txt files. Word processors are too much friction for personal notes.
The only cases where I want sophisticated formatting features are for other people's documents, which means it's their business to pick the format. They don't always pick Office 365. Sometimes it's Confluence, or a company-branded tool that I don't even know what it actually is, or Zoho, or G Suite.
Between running some random word processor that someone else picked for me in my browser, and giving it unrestricted access to my home folder (or having to fiddle around to get it running in a container of some sort), I prefer the browser.
I definitely prefer the browser over imposing a monoculture on word processors. Not so much because I think there's much room to innovate in text editing itself (I often enough copy-and-paste between web-based word processors and Sublime Text), but because of the opportunity to innovate in the data model.
Few regular folk need to share documents and businesses will use name brand word processors for collaboration rather than some unknown, new variation. You're wasting your time, IMO.
Does Apache ever "declare" anything dead? In my experience things are just allowed to drift quietly into bureaucratic ghost towns. I'm not sure if they've ever formally disbanded a project, but maybe somebody has an example.
It would be helpful if OpenOffice were formally killed though. The name "Libreoffice" is not particularly catchy and I can never remember which is which even though I actually have LibreOffice installed on the computer I'm using right now.
Edit: Oh here's an example: https://river.apache.org/ but it took them several years to come to terms with it, but then again that was quicker than OpenOffice, yes.
Edit again: I think coincidentally (or not) Apache River has a similar history to OpenOffice, in that after buying Sun Microsystems, Oracle "donated" it to Apache, "donated" meaning "Good luck, this isn't our problem anymore." One of those things that looks like goodwill but really isn't...
Apache moves projects to the "attic" regularly. It's a well known process but requires the project community to be really dead. Which is not the case of OpenOffice just yet. See https://attic.apache.org/
> Projects whose PMC are unable to muster 3 votes for a release, who have no active committers or are unable to fulfill their reporting duties to the board are all good candidates for the Attic.
Others have mentioned the Attic, but I think the other crucial thing to be aware of here is that to the Apache Software Foundation, it's all about community. When a project wants to graduate from the Incubator and become a top-level project, no one asks what cutting-edge technology and new innovation is available for download, they ask about the health of the community. Are there enough active contributors? Do they come from a diverse set of employers? Is the mailing list traffic stable? Are you actually making releases and getting people to vote on things? There's no rule about how much work has to be in each release. That may, as you say, lead to bureaucratic ghost towns where the technological innovation has stopped, but that's why. That innovation is up to the individual communities. And as long as the community is there, Apache governance will not just barge in and tell you you're done.
I was on the PMC for a project that is now in the Attic. The project had been dead for a long time already. There was a discussion about killing it - only one company still had any interest and even they weren't actively doing anything. Apache wanted to see 3 active PMC members, so I volunteered to be one of the 3 if other people were interested, but then the next time they asked it was clear that no one was actually going to do anything. No releases. No mailing list traffic. No votes. THAT was what killed the project. The project had basically stopped innovating soon after graduating to a top-level project and had been that way for years - but there WAS active maintenance and an active mailing list of users. And Apache is fine with it - it is, as they say, a natural part of the life cycle of a project to go into maintenance mode.
As long as people are responding on the OpenOffice mailing list and releases are happening, Apache can consider that community alive. That they're not keeping up with LibreOffice or making major releases is not really a big concern. If the community really dies, yeah that's what the Attic is for.
That said if they don't plan to change, I'd love to see the community endorse LibreOffice as a successor.
While the OP says the last major release was in 2014, I just checked and the last patch release was May 2022. So it isn't dead-dead, or even brain-dead. I've seen worse.
Who cares about "keeping up with LibreOffice?" The idea that this is a competition is an idea that seems to only be constantly promulgated by the LO camp.
AOO exists and releases on the pace that they can. If that isn't sufficient for some people, those people are welcome to jump to LO. For people who are happy with AOO, so be it. How about a little more "live and let live" here people, instead of the LO camp always trying to bully AOO out of existence just so they can declare final and complete victory? Maybe they'd like to drink the blood of the AOO developers out of their skulls as well just to emphasize the point?
I literally said "X is not really a concern" and you come back with "Who cares about X?" and something about drinking the blood out of skulls? Whoa. Slow down a sec.
I don't see anyone rooting for AOO to die. The only reason I see here for people to care about keeping up with LibreOffice see that AOO got a much better known brand and clearly haven't done as much with it, causing people to try out an open-source office suite and have a subpar experience with FOSS.
I was just using what you said as a "conversation prompt". My post wasn't really a reply to you per-se. I'm talking about something more abstract, and about the people out there who do treat "keeping up with LibreOffice" as some kind of big deal. Apologies for the confusion.
IIUC, the central Apache organization can’t or at least doesn’t declare projects dead. I’m not sure what would happen if the maintainers literally disappeared, but as long as the project’s PMC stays active and wants to keep going they can.
Here's what I suggested as a goal for OpenOffice, in September 2016 which is now six years ago, as a response to Apache officer Jim Jagielski ("jimjag") who thought this was going well:
[[[ I urge you, or the Apache board generally, to look at the facts, and not get yourself into the mess of trusting AOO project members' gut instinct that everything is fine or that the board's oversight is the problem and you should just stop looking. For sure, it is possible that they'll actually manage to turn this around. But there are already AOO people convinced they've done it, and there were six months ago, when in fact as you know they were in deep trouble already. Their feelings about this aren't going to be objective. If in say, three months, there's no measurable evidence that AOO is back on course then regardless of what is said by the handful of AOO people, retirement is the right choice.
For example, shipping AOO 4.2 in 10 weeks at ApacheConEU. That's not crazy. Libreoffice goes from feature freeze to release in 10 weeks. A healthy AOO development community should be able to do it, or come so close as to leave no-one in any doubt. ]]]
Again, I wrote that in September 2016. Did Apache in fact ship OpenOffice 4.2 at that year's ApacheConEU? No they did not. OK, so when did they finally ship the "imminent" OpenOffice 4.2? Never.
Here's what the most recent quarterly summary from the Apache OpenOffice project to Apache's board said about version 4.2, "An alpha and/or beta release is planned for the next quarter". That sounds optimistic doesn't it? Well, sadly that's also what it said in January 2020. Huh. Who writes this stuff? Funny, it's Jim Jagielski, the same guy I was addressing six years ago.
Try to avoid caring whether people are incompetent or liars, you will find it difficult to tell which is which, so if you ensure you can treat both the same you needn't distinguish. In this case I needn't worry about whether Jim was too stupid to know what the problem was in 2016 or just didn't care.
That's a consequence of the ASF largely serving as a way to dump software that isn't commercially viable (or wasn't to begin with). The idea being that a community can form around it, consisting of former users and developers. Taking software to the ASF is accompanied by a grant to the ASF, and I think it's a decent way to stop developing a product, or is at least miles better than a torched earth approach and stop sales, support, development immediately, firing developers, etc. Not everything will live on ofc, but at least one can try.
I often feel like projects that are handed over to Apache are basically put in the equivalent of an aircraft boneyard; stashed for archival purposes, but it will no longer receive much development effort.
Seems to be the pattern. Whenever something gets the "Apache" prefix I get nervous that it's abandoned.
Giving Apache ownership of something is always a signal that whoever was maintaining it before, doesn't want to maintain it anymore. Whether or not that thing dies depends entirely on who ends up running the project post transition to apache.
Funnily, there have been a few cases of projects that have seen a breath of new life by moving over to apache. Netbeans and Groovy seem to be standouts there.
Companies handing their failed projects over definitely seems to be a pattern.
On the other hand the ASF has a few very active and healthy projects under its umbrella, sometimes being among if not the go to solution inside a specific problem space.
Cassandra and most of the Hadoop zoo too, but that's mostly because of a few vendors. (Eg. DataStax for Cassandra, and Cloudera & Hortonworks for Hadoop. Plus probably a bunch of smaller ones.)
But I'd suggest they need some, and also minimum requirements for remaining an Apache project, which if not met, the project will be either removed, or perhaps just clearly marked archived/unmaintained/historical on apache pages. (a status from which perhaps there is a way to escape with renewed attention as well).
The practical answer is that you go and look at a project's release history at its primary repo. I don't know of a good way to browse all apache projects by livelihood though. The closest thing I know of to keep track of Apache projects overall is this:
Practically never used anything but httpd (which I no longer use) and everything else looked like bloated software being Java taking huge resource and usually has a better competitor.
I occasionally see Kafka being used as parts of software stack but not sure if that is the best choice with huge resource use.
I've learned over the last decade or so just to avoid Apache software. It seems like the vast majority of their software is poorly written, enterprise abandonware. They are a joke of their former self. Kind of sad really.
I see a lot of blah blah blah below, but none of it gets to the crux of the matter, and that is LibreOffice is klunky.
I used to have it installed, because I had installed it for my father-in-law and I was his tech support (he passed a couple years ago).
The API in Writer is a mess. Okay? I am sure I'll get some people sqawking for be saying that out loud, but I also know a bunch of you will be nodding in agreement.
And don't get me started on Calc.
Lets get another thing clear, I don't love Microsoft Word. I don't. But then, my original experience writing documentation was in nroff/troff using Writer's Workbench. Then later, TeX. But the truth is, through work, or school, a ton of people have become accustomed to be productive in Word.
And Excel is simply Superior to Calc in every way.
And yes, Microsoft is up to their old tricks, the bastards. We all know it.
I mean, WSL2 was pretty good in Windows 10, but OMG WSL2 in Windows 11 competely rules. Native Linux USB support. Wow. That is some wicked bundling there.
And then, if you have a family, Office 365, just for the fact that you can hand it out to a total of five other people, and you each get 1TB of cloud storage. For $99 per year. Again, wicked sneaky bundling. Six instances of 1TB cloud for $99? We only use five here, so $20 each, per year, for 1TB of cloud. Oh yeah, you get to use Office 365 if you want, as well.
So year, Microsoft pulls under handed market bundling.
But that doesn't excuse the fact that LibreOffice is Klunky.
Now that I no longer have to support it, I don't miss it at all.
This is kind of like asking why one shouldn't run Microsoft Office 2003 anymore.
Does it still work? Sure... is it secure and has feature parity with modern offerings? Definitely not.
Perhaps that's fine - but since LibreOffice is also free and is actively developed (by many of the original OpenOffice team too), I don't see a compelling reason to not make the switch.
Yes. Do you absolutely trust everybody who sends you a doc or spreadsheet? Do you trust that much everyone who sends them one, that they pass along to you?
It is better not to need to think about that, much.
There's definitely a significant niche for offline word processor, spreadsheet, drawing diagrams and such. I do not want to go online, register, have my data "in the cloud", fume when it goes down because of AWS of buggy update, lose it when the company decides to fold, etc. I want to fire up an application on my local, edit it there, and save it on my local. If I need collaboration, well, there's plenty of tools for that.
But I'm old and my 14yo son never saw even MS Word (leave along LibreOffice) until I showed it to him, they do everything in Google Docs and that's all they know. So maybe I'm part of a dying breed :-)
I am not sure that online collaboration is such a killer feature.
Most of the time I would take a good offline office app over the application that requires an internet connection, stores my data in the cloud and forces its design choices, from the UI to the security, down my throat "because of the way cloud apps work". My 2c.
To add onto this, I have been using Libreoffice Online or Collabora Online for the last 4 years or so. I used to compile LOOL myself but eventually I just switched over to using the Collabora Online Development Edition that Collabora releases. I am using it integrated with Nextcloud.
I enjoy using it and it has been a life savior for the times I need to work on a document with someone else since I can just send them a share link for it. The fact that it uses leaflet which is meant for maps does mean that the latency to the server matters quite a lot to experience but I don't mind that much, personally, with my not great 120ms RTT to my server.
Hey - thanks for using Collabora Online (COOL) - we're doing a chunk of work to accelerate interactive editing, and lots of that starts to land in 22.05 - time-based document change compression (deltas), improved JS, reduced latency of event handling (particularly in the browser where handling websockets related to rendering & the DOM is a bit too 'exciting') - with lots of wins recently. Hopefully you can enjoy them in our next release coming soon.
What I'd really like is on office suite that lives on my own device (e.g. my router), where I own my data. That's not the way the world went, but c'est la vie.
Synology has a full Google Drive replacement with apps built-in.
I think the fact that I'm The first person to mention it here, and the fact you didn't find it yourself, is revealing about the true level of demand for such a product.
Of course, there's no way to try it or to buy it from there....
I see random devices for sale for under $200, but I'm not sure if they include it. If I bought it, I'm not sure how well it works.
We have no idea of the level of demand for a product that well-hidden. The fact I just spent 5-10 minutes without figuring trying to figure this out without success means we have no idea.
As a footnote, I do have a random machine running a random online office suite. It works, but not well enough to be generally usable.
What if you could host it on your laptop or a server you pay for?
When I suggested something a company could host I imagined it replacing Office 365 or Google Docs (a concern governments may have about having American companies host their data). Being able to self host and allow collaboration without relying on a third party application is important.
Honestly I hate online office tools. They encourage a collaboration model that just doesn't work for me _at all_ - and yet is, by now, _the standard_.
I'd much rather send documents back and forth, with comments I integrate with the material. If I _need_ to do something live, plain text is actually not just perfectly sufficient - it's either _exactly_ what I want, or what I want is a white board (and therefore please let's just use self-hosted Excalidraw - but remember to sponsor it if you're commercial!).
But outside of very rare occasions, let's just set up a plain old mailing list, write proposals in basic text, and then once we have something complete, let one person integrate the whole thing into a single pretty document with like LaTeX or Markdown or something. Or even Word, I don't really care.
And yes, that's hostile to brainstorming. Good. I too am hostile to brainstorming.
Because of what’s been highlighted in this article I found it super difficult to figure out a good alternative to MS Office, so agree 100% with the article. Now a happy LibreOffice user.
Not the gp (and not IT/Tech based) but I have OpenOffice available because...
1) editing documents I wrote some time ago. There was a time some months ago when LO would warn you when opening an older oOo doc about changes in the format. I saw this with drawings and Impress files. (I need to see if this still happens with latest LO).
2) one of my employers has oOo on their standard desktop image alongside MS Word and all. So I want the same as them for their documents
3) I know the menus and the little UI glitches well in oOo having used it since StarOffice days. LO is (entirely reasonably) refactoring stuff and therefore changing the ways some features work (drawing tools I recollect)
4) gives the impression of running snappier on an ancient laptop that I use. LO does seem to need a full DE (e.g. Gnome/KDE/xfce)
...if oOo life support was switched off, I'd shrug, move all the documents over to LO, and move on I suppose.
Not OP, but I know sometimes I forget I want LibreOffice. Many years ago I worked for a computer store where I used to refurbish computers everyday with OpenOffice so open OpenOffice is still the brand that first comes to mind for me. I never get very far though because as soon as I see "Apache OpenOffice" I realise my mistake and search for LibreOffice.
But I'd assume lot of OpenOffice users today are just legacy users who use it just because they're familiar with the brand and that's what they've always used.
(not the poster) one of my problems with LibreOffice is that it sucks when you are not using English as your main language - little support for spell checkers, etc. At some stage open office used to be better in that respect!
OnlyOffice is far from being as comprehensive as LibreOffice. At least when I tried the spreadsheets, I ran into limitations even though I use spreadsheets very rarely.
1) No Windows release afaik. But please correct me if I am wrong -- I don't see a Win download on their page from a quick look on my phone.
2) I did use it on Ubuntu sometime in college (around 2016 for class) and I just didn't like the feel of Libre. OpenOffice still had a lot of feature parity with Excel without buying Excel, so I got that instead.
>1) No Windows release afaik. But please correct me if I am wrong -- I don't see a Win download on their page from a quick look on my phone.
It's been available for Windows for years. The first option on the drop-down menus says "Windows (64-bit)"[0]. 90% of their 10 million worldwide users in 2011 were on Windows machines[1].
On the download page, just above the "Download" button, there is a dropdown to select the installer. There should be "Windows (32-bit)" and "Windows (64-bit)" there along with the Linux and MacOS installers.
Others have already noted that the windows release is easily findable, so instead I will ask: what features are missing from LibreOffice that OpenOffice has? The former is a fork of the latter, and LibreOffice has undergone extensive further development where OpenOffice has stagnated.
After checking this thread, I downloaded Libre on Windows and played around with it a little, to refresh my memory. My main use case is just working with some personal spreadsheets in Calc, no complicated work stuff.
I wouldn't say features are missing, if anything it sounds like Libre is way more fleshed out than OpenOffice. That said, I still prefer the (relatively) legacy UI in Open Calc than the slightly more modern UI in Libre Calc, just a personal preference. It doesn't seem that much more advanced, and after all these years an ODS spreadsheet still looks like a spreadsheet. Other people noted the security posture of Libre though, which is a great point.
Just wanted to chime in that your reasoning here is 100% valid.
I'd also be curious about something: suppose you used LibreOffice for a week or so for working on your personal spreadsheets. What percentage of your work time would you waste either searching for the new location for the old command, or learning the new command that maps to the old one?
I'd love to read a case study where someone has documented this with a UI change in FOSS.
For me personally? 0%. I just do simple copy/paste, scatter plot, sort asc/desc... not a heavy user of hotkeys. I had some trouble finding the Chart button at first since the icon's different, but that was the only issue.
At one point, an exploitable security issue was unpatched for about 6 months. There was a small note on the site of how to work around it, but it wasn't very noticeable. And every download of it still had the unpatched issue in it until they finally had the resources to release an update. The main purpose of the update was to patch the issue out of the box.
openoffice came out years before libreoffice, so if you had learned to work with it at the time and you still find it sufficient, then why switch? I doubt libreoffice is 1:1 identical in terms of UI/hotkeys/etc
LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle bought it. The community switched over to LibreOffice, so it's not like OpenOffice has a longer history than LibreOffice. They have the same history for the first years before the fork, and OpenOffice essentially died as a community project after the fork.
What happened later is that LibreOffice was rebased on top of the re-licensed Apache OpenOffice, to take advantage of the more compatible licensing. But it had been forked (as go-oo) from OpenOffice much earlier.
Playing devil's advocate: if Word 97 (or something even older like wordperfect) does all you need, why should you upgrade?
Things are different, of course, when you have to interoperate with other people (in the word processor case, mainly by reading files written by other people); not only do security fixes become more relevant, but also newer versions of the software have greater compatibility (in the word processor case, not only there was a lot of work on libreoffice towards better compatibility with Microsoft document formats, but also AFAIK newer libreoffice versions write by default using a newer version of the OpenDocument formats, so if you have an outdated word processor, you might have difficulty reading files written by other people using these newer versions).
Hi! I'm making this comment via a work computer that has Office 2010 on it. It's not the same thing, sure, but it's a great example of how people are definitely still using old office-related software.
There are people who don't need to do that. Their use case may be writing the monthly newsletter for the local rabbit breeders club, or writing that novel they've been working on for decades now (and totally are going to finish any day now! I can relate, because I've got two or three of those saved somewhere).
To these people, there are no benefits in upgrading.
(Also, I've spent a lot of time teaching my parents not to open office documents attached to emails, as that has become a popular way for people to spread malware.)
Depends; has LibreOffice gained any features since the fork? I've had to use it on and off at my previous job and the experience was pretty poor, it ran slowly, dated UI, etc.
The fork happened in 2011, 11 years ago, so there are 11 years of refinement and new features. OpenOffice is in maintenance mode so there are no new features, only bug fixes.
One of the biggest features of LibreOffice over OpenOffice is compatibility with Microsoft Office files.
OpenOffice can open Microsoft Office files but doesn't support as many features as LibreOffice does.
OpenOffice can't save in the newer Microsoft Office formats (docx, xlsx, etc) but LibreOffice can.
Also, LibreOffice now has a ribbon-like interface. To enable it, click View > User Interface and choose Tabbed.
Trademarks. Contracts. Egos. I was there when it all happened. When Oracle refused to transfer the trademarks to the Document Foundation. When loud voices on many sides shouted at each other. Leading to the current situation. My current position: Who cares. ODF and Libre Office's community managed to move forward. Let the ASF have their Open Office.
If trends are telling, as the author seems to think, they tell of Libre's decline, too.
One thing I noticed is that the web based MS Office products are significantly snappier and less quirky than their desktop counterparts. Maybe that is part of it?
Unrelated: I also noticed that Visio, which I previously found quite pleasant to use, actually is nigh unusable (Desktop - no web version exists). Was it always this bad and have my standards simply gone up, or did it deteriorate?
This is what scares me: a FOSS project maintained by a corporation. I tend to install FOSS because imo they are more "future-proof", but some of them are developed by companies (e.g., Fedora Linux) and that makes me wonder if they're truly future-proof.
> I tend to install FOSS because imo they are more "future-proof", but some of them are developed by companies (e.g., Fedora Linux) and that makes me wonder if they're truly future-proof.
The story of CentOS should be telling that, no, many pieces of software that are backed by a company will not be future-proof and will probably experience certain changes as a consequence of that, be it being transformed to better fit corporate goals (CentOS Stream), or being retired eventually so the company may focus on something else (Atom), or will just be left to slowly rot over time as happens with most code (OpenOffice).
Then again, it's not like open source projects are that future proof or safe from "drama" either - for example, the Lubuntu project has 2 homepages for no reason: the official one at https://lubuntu.me/ and some other one that serves old versions and is not trusted by my ad blocking solution https://lubuntu.net/
There are also cases, when open source projects experience fragmentation like happened with Gogs https://gogs.io/ and Gitea https://gitea.io/en-us/ and sometimes there are cases where particular individuals simply cannot work together and as a consequence pretty much the same happens, as was the case with Swoole and Open Swoole: https://github.com/swoole/swoole-src/issues/4434
Treat most pieces of software that you use as if they might not be there in a year. Or, alternatively, as if you might need to take over the maintenance of whatever you're using, if you can.
The "future-proof" is that if the corp goes belly up or insane, you can in theory fork the project and continue it, which if there's enough of a user base will happen.
But if there's enough of a user base the company probably won't abandon it.
Things like Fedora are potentially at a bit more risk, because if IBM decides to stop developing it for whatever reason most users will probably just switch to an entire different distro (or a related one) than bother continuing the existing.
> if the corp goes belly up or insane, you can in theory fork the project
Yes: for a small + useful + easy to maintain project.
No: for bloated or difficult to build projects, which makes most of popular browsers, corp-driven programming languages, devops tools, office suites, corp-driven IDEs, Linux distros...
Not to mention non-copyleft licenses that allow proprietization and discourage communties.
good readers - I am here to tell you, from experience with my own two eyes, popular important and public software projects absolutely do get closed by private companies, for so many reasons. None of the reasons are "your benefit"
Unless you're in a closed circle who all use similar version of LibreOffice, it's better to use Google's offering or just pay $10/mo for MS' Office and also get 1TB storage, which sounds like a steal and have a less headache with file compatibilities.
That does seem to depend on why/how it ends up at Apache. Something like OpenOffice, or the myriad of Java projects, which have just been throw in under the umbrella is more or less abandoned. There seems to be some misconception that Apache has a number of developers sitting ready, or a ton of money to hire developers to take on any random project.
Projects under Apache really only works when the developers are involved and follow the project. At this point I'm a little unsure what The Apache Foundation provides, beyond hosting and some legal support.
I mean yes of course use what works for now, but I think eventually those will die off too. As with most things, Apache projects tend to be bloated Java apps that end up being phased out by more trendy and more performant apps built in Go/Rust.
An unwillingness to update a webpage as well as refusing to do bare maintenance for years is astounding. It could have been an unintentional oversight, until the 2020 letter by LibreOffice. (Yes that was not the first to comment). As far as I know, there hasn't been a change - not even an acknowledgement of the letter.
It's been long enough; this is not unintentional and the lack of any response for so long has gone beyond what can be excused by a slow-moving bureaucracy. Moreover, updating the site to acknowledge that the project isn't updated is trivial, truthful, and needful for its users. Therefore that is a more than reasonable expectation for an app with its recognition - even if there were no other competing apps. But nope, nothing.
I was addressing your analogy to "stolen election".
At any rate, I'm just pointing out that (1) any decent project would address this situation once they were aware of it, (2) Apache is aware of it, and (3) they had way, way more than enough time to at least acknowledge the issue. Neither ignorance nor bureaucratic slowness can excuse their complete lack of taking any action to protect their users. If you exclude ignorance and slowness as reasons, this is intentional.
I don't know why, but the fact that something is actually wrong on a significant scale and is intentional in no way matches "stolen election logic".
But that isn’t the source, is it? That’s a movie which is hardly reflective of reality.
That said, you do have to let others — Full Fact, for example — do fact checking for you. You can never know everything in enough detail to fact-check it, and it’s foolish to think otherwise.
> Continue outsourcing instead of watching the source yourself.
I've seen the movie, and I've read the fact checks. Even before reading them though I noticed multiple flaws and problems while watching. If you still think that movie is credible as evidence of wide-scale election fraud I recommend you brush up on your critical thinking skills. If you've already learned how to spot weak arguments and manipulations, maybe you're just out of practice.
Personally, I recommend consuming a lot of content that advocates for positions you strongly disagree with. You'll find that you can't help but nitpick every weak argument. Do that enough, and you'll find you won't be able to stop spotting problems with bad arguments no matter how much you agree with the underlying message or where it's coming from.
> Did you find some good content that advocated for positions you disagreed with on that topic?
I read a lot of stories and commentary around that time from across the political spectrum, but this wasn't something I had very firm positions on beyond "Russia very likely did attempt to interfere with the election".
I believed (and still do) that there was enough evidence to justify the investigation into Russian interference in the election and what role Trump and his campaign had in that, but yeah, there were a lot of accusations flying around, presented as fact, well before the reports were out and I do disagree with that. Since the investigations didn't find that there was no collusion, only that there was not enough evidence for criminal charges the situation hasn't improved much either. There are still folks who claim Trump was proved innocent of any collusion which is inaccurate and those who say the evidence uncovered only supports the accusation that collusion occurred which might be true, but doesn't change the fact that even in total it doesn't amount to anything strong enough for charges. "Innocent until proven guilty" means that Trump isn't guilty of criminal conspiracy.
The fact checks are very biased and can't bring themselves to state the known facts without bringing up other unrelated things ("Trump claims he didn't collude with Putin but people who are not Trump were indicted for things that were not colluding with Putin to hack the election"), etc.
Mueller's report does, in fact, say explicitly that they did not find evidence that Trump or anyone in his campaign "colluded" (conspired) to interfere with the election. The report is public you can see that stated plainly.
The "fact" checkers also skirted around the problem that conspiracy theorists from the Clinton campaign and DNC operatives like Schiff knowingly lied and peddled dangerous misinformation to subvert democracy ("ample evidence"). Funny they omitted this relevant detail entirely and yet they thought it was appropriate to go off on tangential topics that were not related to the charges of conspiring to interfere in the election.
All goes to show you can't trust fact checkers just because they call themselves fact checkers.
> I believed (and still do) that there was enough evidence to justify the investigation into Russian interference in the election and what role Trump and his campaign had in that
What evidence? There never was any that wasn't fabricated. When I've asked people this they've been reduced to pointing to Trump's "Russia if you're listening" which was an obvious joke.
> Mueller's report does, in fact, say explicitly that they did not find evidence that Trump or anyone in his campaign "colluded" (conspired) to interfere with the election. The report is public you can see that stated plainly.
It does not say that explicitly. You claim it does, so prove it. Show where it says that. I'll even go first:
"In particular, the Office did not find evidence likely to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Campaign officials such as Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page acted as agents of the Russian government—or at its direction, control, or request—during the relevant time period."
Not having evidence sufficient to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt is not the same as not finding evidence. The report is filled with evidence. It just didn't amount to enough to support charges. The report concludes with:
"The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."
The report is very clear that it does not exonerate Trump. It says they'd outright say he was innocent of obstruction if they thought that was true, but they can't say that. It makes clear that they have evidence. It states very plainly that don't feel the evidence they have is enough to prove that crimes were committed beyond a reasonable doubt.
> All goes to show you can't trust fact checkers just because they call themselves fact checkers.
That's the great thing about fact checkers. They have to use facts and those facts have to verifiable. You don't have to blindly trust them. You can follow their sources and evaluate it on your own.
> What evidence? There never was any that wasn't fabricated.
It was clear pretty much immediately that Russia was engaged in a campaign to influence the election. That alone is a big deal. A genuine threat to our democracy. Folks were very concerned about foreign interference in our elections.
Evidence that Trump and his campaign my have been involved started with Australia notifying the US that Papadopoulos (an adviser to Trump's campaign) might have known about the hacked emails before they were released. Papadopoulos had told Alexander Downer (an Australian diplomat) that Russia had acquired and could leak material that would be damaging to Clinton. The FBI started to dig in and found there were a lot of links between the Trump campaign and Russia (For examples see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...).
So here we had Trump, with all these connections to Russia, taking advantage of and benefiting directly from the criminal acts committed by Russia to influence the election. And now there was also evidence that Trump's campaign had been provided with information about Russia's illegal actions. That isn't direct evidence that Trump or his campaign did anything criminal, but it's plenty of reason for an investigation.
I'm glad they did their job and investigated. For what it's worth, I'm also actually glad Russia hacked the DNC and exposed the fact that they were/are corrupt. They ignored the will of democratic voters by selecting their preferred candidate before the primary and worked directly with Hillary's campaign to undermine her opposition to get her elected. Many people had already been suspecting that was true, but if not for the email hack we wouldn't have had the evidence to prove it.
> It does not say that explicitly. You claim it does, so prove it.
"The Office
considered in particular whether contacts between Trump Campaign officials and Russia-linked
individuals could trigger liability for the crime of conspiracy—either under statutes that have their
own conspiracy language (e.g., 18 U.S.C. §§ 1349, 1951(a)), or under the general conspiracy
statute (18 U.S.C. § 371). The investigation did not establish that the contacts described in Volume
I, Section IV, supra, amounted to an agreement to commit any substantive violation of federal
criminal law—including foreign-influence and campaign-finance laws, both of which are
discussed further below. The Office therefore did not charge any individual associated with the
Trump Campaign with conspiracy to commit a federal offense arising from Russia contacts, either
under a specific statute or under Section 371’s offenses clause.
The Office also did not charge any campaign official or associate with a conspiracy under
Section 371’s defraud clause. That clause criminalizes participating in an agreement to obstruct a
lawful function of the U.S. government or its agencies through deceitful or dishonest means. See
Dennis v. United States , 384 U.S. 855, 861 (1966); Hammerschmidt v. United States , 265 U.S.
182, 188 (1924); see also United States v. Concord Mgmt. & Consulting LLC, 347 F. Supp. 3d 38,
46 (D.D.C. 2018). The investigation did not establish any agreement among Campaign officials—
or between such officials and Russia-linked individuals—to interfere with or obstruct a lawful
function of a government agency during the campaign or transition period. And, as discussed in
Volume I, Section V.A, supra, the investigation did not identify evidence that any Campaign
official or associate knowingly and intentionally participated in the conspiracy to defraud that the
Office charged, namely, the active-measures conspiracy described in Volume I, Section II, supra.
Accordingly, the Office did not charge any Campaign associate or other U.S. person with
conspiracy to defraud the United States based on the Russia-related contacts described in Section
IV above."
It _also_ contains weasel wording to the effect that not finding evidence does not mean none exists, and talking about reasonable doubt when considering charging, but that's pretty meaningless because any circumstantial evidence falls under that category. There'd probably be more circumstantial evidence that Obama colluded with Putin to "hack the election" than Trump did, so making these bold *not exonerated* statements is ridiculous.
Adam Schiff, despite years lying and disseminating false information and conspiracy theories in an effort to overturn a democratic election from his privileged position in an intelligence committee, never elaborated on any of that alleged "ample evidence" that he repeatedly lied about seeing. Wouldn't he have tried to save some face if anything remotely compelling was actually there? There never was.
> It was clear pretty much immediately that Russia was engaged in a campaign to influence the election. That alone is a big deal. A genuine threat to our democracy. Folks were very concerned about foreign interference in our elections.
That's not evidence Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election. Obama actually was not concerned about it, after secretly promising Putin he would be "more flexible", he ordered US cyber security agency to stand down and cease countering Russia's cyber attacks in the lead up to the election.
While that was happening he was also lying to the American people about the election being absolutely secure and under no threats. There's far more circumstantial evidence he colluded with Putin to hack the election than Trump did, if that's the standard of "evidence" we're going by.
> Evidence that Trump and his campaign my have been involved started with Australia notifying the US that Papadopoulos (an adviser to Trump's campaign) might have known about the hacked emails before they were released. Papadopoulos had told Alexander Downer (an Australian diplomat) that Russia had acquired and could leak material that would be damaging to Clinton. The FBI started to dig in and found there were a lot of links between the Trump campaign and Russia (For examples see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...).
Claims by some person that some other person claimed that they somehow knew about Russia having damaging information isn't evidence to open an investigation of treason on a political campaign.
> So here we had Trump, with all these connections to Russia, taking advantage of and benefiting directly from the criminal acts committed by Russia to influence the election. That isn't direct evidence that Trump or his campaign did anything criminal, but it's plenty of reason for an investigation.
This is just more handwaving about "all these connections". There's no actual evidence. Probable cause is more than just "oh a friend of a friend told me", or "oh he knew all these people". Imagine thinking that justified wiretapping and investigating a political campaign -- you could spy on anybody. Look at all Biden's connections and allegations about his links with foreign countries. Or Clinton's.
> I'm glad they did their job and investigated.
They never had solid probable cause for such a wide ranging investigation and it really looks like a politically motivated muck raking exercise, and a baseless conspiracy theory peddled by the DNC and their lackeys in the media and bureaucracy.
> For what it's worth, I'm actually glad Russia hacked the DNC and exposed the fact that they were/are corrupt. They ignored the will of democratic voters by selecting their preferred candidate before the primary and worked directly with Hillary's campaign to undermine her opposition to get her elected. Many people had already been suspecting that was true, but if not for the email hack we wouldn't have had the evidence to prove it.
There isn't even good evidence that it was Russia that exfiltrated the emails.
> "The Office considered in particular whether contacts between Trump Campaign officials and Russia-linked individuals could trigger liability for the crime of conspiracy
you missed a lot of context there... starting with the sentence just before your selection where they make it clear they're not talking about "collusion" but about conspiracy. Not finding evidence for conspiracy is not the same thing as not finding evidence for collusion.
"For that reason, this Office’s focus in resolving the question of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law, not the commonly discussed term “collusion.”"
Even before that though the section opens with:
"As explained in Section IV above, the Office’s investigation uncovered evidence of numerous links (i.e., contacts) between Trump Campaign officials and individuals having or claiming to have ties to the Russian government."
and further states
"Finally, although the evidence of contacts between Campaign officials and Russia-affiliated individuals may not have been sufficient to establish or sustain criminal charges, several U.S. persons connected to the Campaign made false statements about those contacts and took other steps to obstruct the Office’s investigation and those of Congress."
This is part of the problem. They've got a ton of evidence of collusion. In this same section they make that clear by calling out the meeting between "campaign officials and Russians promising derogatory information on Hillary Clinton". That alone is evidence of collusion.
When you say there's no evidence of collusion it's just wrong. The problem they had is that "collusion" itself isn't a crime you can charge someone with. They instead had to see if other crimes (like conspiracy) were committed in the course of the collusion that took place. Nothing they had was enough to meet that standard.
Now, they also make it very clear that their lack of evidence may be due deliberate efforts to impede the investigation, but again, they say they don't think Trump is innocent of obstruction, yet they don't think they can successfully charge him with it either. This is the ambiguity that has the left and right talking past each other.
> Claims by some person that some other person claimed that they somehow knew about Russia having damaging information isn't evidence to open an investigation of treason on a political campaign.
Information from a trusted ally that one or more individuals working on Trump's campaign may have information about an attempt by a foreign nation to influence US elections sure is! The information came from a diplomat (not just some random person) who heard it directly from someone working on Trumps campaign (also not a random person).
I guess we can disagree on if that should be enough information to investigate, but the FBI felt that it was. I suspect that people telling other people things is a pretty common way to gather intelligence and you'd probably find a lot of foreign intelligence the US government feels is actionable to be insufficient to warrant even an investigation.
> Imagine thinking that justified wiretapping and investigating a political campaign -- you could spy on anybody.
Um... amusing you're in the US literally every communication you have transmitted over a wire (including this one) is being spied on. It's been true for ages. Same for everyone else in the US. I'm not saying that it's right, but in the US the justification for spying is not something our government is concerned about. Maybe you are right and they should need more evidence but with things as they right now, they had all the evidence they needed.
> There isn't even good evidence that it was Russia that exfiltrated the emails.
Mandiant, CrowdStrike, FireEye, and several others all agree it was Russia. It's not always easy to pin any particular attack or malware on a specific group of hackers. I always leave room for some doubt, but I see no reason not to trust these experts to give us the best analysis they can and they all reached the same conclusion. It would take stronger evidence or at least a larger consensus of expert analysis of our current evidence to convince me Russia wasn't involved. What convinced you?
> you missed a lot of context there... starting with the sentence just before your selection where they make it clear they're not talking about "collusion" but about conspiracy. Not finding evidence for conspiracy is not the same thing as not finding evidence for collusion.
> "For that reason, this Office’s focus in resolving the question of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law, not the commonly discussed term “collusion.”"
I didn't miss that, it just wasn't particularly relevant. The "that reason" was that it just isn't a rigorously defined legal term. The correct term to use is "conspiracy", as carefully explained in the context you missed.
> "As explained in Section IV above, the Office’s investigation uncovered evidence of numerous links (i.e., contacts) between Trump Campaign officials and individuals having or claiming to have ties to the Russian government."
Not evidence of collusion to break the law (aka conspiracy).
> "Finally, although the evidence of contacts between Campaign officials and Russia-affiliated individuals may not have been sufficient to establish or sustain criminal charges, several U.S. persons connected to the Campaign made false statements about those contacts and took other steps to obstruct the Office’s investigation and those of Congress."
Not of charges of conspiracy to hack the election though. Nobody ever claimed that out of hundreds of people in Trump's campaign or associated with him had never committed any crimes. I think the crimes (aside from the process crimes) they actually did find evidence for were things that had been committed before the people were associated with the campaign.
> This is part of the problem. They've got a ton of evidence of collusion. In this same section they make that clear by calling out the meeting between "campaign officials and Russians promising derogatory information on Hillary Clinton". That alone is evidence of collusion.
_What_ is evidence of collusion to illegally interfere in the election?
> When you say there's no evidence of collusion it's just wrong. The problem they had is that "collusion" itself isn't a crime you can charge someone with.
Colluding to hack the election absolutely is a criminal conspiracy that could be charged. That's what we're talking about here. There was no evidence for it.
Sure there was lots of evidence for lots of things that weren't crimes.
> They instead had to see if other crimes (like conspiracy) were committed in the course of the collusion that took place. Nothing they had was enough to meet that standard.
No, you misunderstand this entire aspect of the report. The Horowitz report was damning and said that evidence that was turned up by the investigation was continually exculpatory.
> Information from a trusted ally that one or more individuals working on Trump's campaign may have information about an attempt by a foreign nation to influence US elections sure is!
No, it isn't. It came from a foreign diplomat to a 3rd foreign country and related to alleged drunken boast that they thought Russia had dirt. That's not reasonable evidence of Trump colluding with Putin to hack the election. It just isn't. I can't fathom how you think that would be a reasonable system of justice, it sounds like some horrible communist police state.
> I guess we can disagree on if that should be enough information to investigate, but the FBI felt that it was. I suspect that people telling other people things is a pretty common way to gather intelligence and you'd probably find a lot of foreign intelligence the US government feels is actionable to be insufficient to warrant even an investigation.
No, these particular claims should almost certainly have been investigated for what they were. They were not evidence of Trump colluding with Putin to hack the election though so they absolutely should not have kicked off a full scale investigation into Trump and his entire presidential campaign. Not unless they turned up something further. Which it did not, as the Mueller report says, and the Horowitz report confirms.
> Um... amusing you're in the US literally every communication you have transmitted over a wire is being spied on. It's been true for ages. Same for everyone else in the US. I'm not saying that it's right, but in the US the justification for spying is not something our government is concerned about. Maybe you are right and they should need more evidence but with things as they right now, they had all the evidence they needed.
Wiretapping and unmasking doesn't get done as a matter of course. Well maybe it does and we don't know about it.
You actually misunderstand that article though, which is (not so) cleverly written to mislead people who are desperately looking for confirmation of their preconceived notions. They did not claim the Russians were the ones who exfiltrated those emails or leaked them. The claim was that they had compromised some of their systems.
"Since the documents have been posted anonymously, there is no clear way to prove their origin"
"It is also possible, researchers said, that someone else besides the Russians were inside the DNC’s network and had access to the same documents."
No claims were ever made about the documents. And nobody ever accused the DNC of running a competent or secure information technology outfit. You only have to look at the likes of their top people in Clinton and Podesta to find it more surprising to learn that Russia, China and others hadn't compromised their systems.
So no, I didn't make a pretty big claim at all. In fact the claim I made is completely supported by link you provided.
> It would take stronger evidence or at least a larger consensus of expert analysis to convince me otherwise. What convinced you?
Even though that link does support me in this case, I will say this though, lots of experts allegedly claimed there was strong evidence that Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election too. The claims about that evidence are just laughable too. At best it's just plausible.
Claims of "expertise" or "independence" on this subject are just worthless. Appeals to authority. What we have to look at is the actual evidence of our own eyes. If that is not provided, then it is not evidence. "Trust me bro" is not evidence. Not even from self-proclaimed independent experts, unfortunately.
Isn't that exactly what you did when you recommended the documentary? I'm willing to wager the Reuters fact checking article went through more scrutiny than the documentary.
> Its last major release was version 4.1, from 2014!
Oh we are playing major version minor version!
Let me try: Libreoffice is only at version 7.3 ! That makes it hundreds of versions behind office365! Proof once again that free software has no business competing with software build by professional commercial developers. Now excuse me while I try to reboot my futuristic Windows 2000. /s
Versions may as well be marketing names for most software. If anyone even mentions them I might as well assume a minor case of serious brain damage. Java just flat out dropped the leading 1, Firefox is in the low hundreds, some software just goes year/moth.
As Apache office still releases updates I find the claim that it is dead highly misleading, but that is presumably the intention if the post.
This is pretty clearly a minor version update. There are only four entries under their improvements / enhancements section, and all but one would be more accurately described as a bug fix. They even identify this as a "maintenance release".
Here are the release notes for the 2022 release of LibreOffice:
Aside from the fact that this is much better documented, you can also at a glance see that this is, in fact, a major version update. LibreOffice isn't padding their versions, they actually are adding new features while OpenOffice fixes a few bugs.
Ideally they should have given LibreOffice the OpenOffice name, but even if they had just said "openoffice is dead" then it would have been easy for people to find libreoffice.
Unfortunately, by taking over the OpenOffice name and absolutely refusing to admit that development has ceased, Apache has caused tons of confusion that has massively harmed libreoffice, because for years people who had heard about "openoffice" would see the terrible, out of date, insecure pile of junk being distributed by the Apache Foundation and not realize that the actively developed LibreOffice was available.
In the case of linux distributions it was less of an issue since they just switched to LibreOffice, but I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice (and possibly taking one look at it and giving up and switching to Office 365).
Apache should have killed OpenOffice years ago but at the very least they should take it down and honestly apologize for fucking this up so badly.
Even ignoring the harm to LibreOffice it's just irresponsible for Apache to keep distributing OpenOffice when they can't even make new releases to simply apply security patches for years.