We still see people on social media recommending OpenOffice. Just be aware that it's no longer getting updates, and has multiple year-old unfixed security issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice#Security – To be safe, switch to one of the actively maintained successor projects (such as LibreOffice).
@libreoffice I don't understand the openoffice project.
They claim to maintain it, and if you look at the repository, there are updates all the time, but pretty much every single one of them are reformatting, some typo fixes, changes to formatting of documentation, etc.
You have to scroll way down before you find a single fix that actually changes the code.
https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commits/trunk/
Just read the commits. It's so very strange.
Why are hey even spending the time doing this? The only explanation I have is that they have some contract where someone is paying them money for it to be updated, and they do the absolute bare minimum to avoid breaking the contract.
This, unfortunately, has had an extremely harmful effect on the open source community, who are best represented by libreoffice here.
@libreoffice I paged down page, after page, after page, and with maybe 3 exceptions, every. single. fix modifies code comments, change the character case of html tags.
Here is one of hundreds of examples: https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/8c3681a51823f1c4a400590c771b000ee885c29d
What on earth is going on? Surely a human isn't assigned to make a few of these changes every single day? Or maybe the contract allows them to afford this?
@loke Wow, that is a really weird commit history. One of the contributors does this across of a bunch of repos. On Wikipedia, we'd call that person a wikignome, somebody who just loves fixing small stuff all over. But the other one just sticks with a small set of repos, for months! I can't find an explanation better than "paid to stick with it", unless maybe it's something else that rewards a grind, like keeping their GitHub activity graph green, or some sort of "top contributors" list that they're trying to work their way up.
@williampietri it's funny that Apache never answered direct questions as to what the status of the project is. All you get is statements like the blog post from about a year ago (the most recent one) where they claim they are making progress, which seems to not be a true statement, given the type of changes that are made.
The only party that benefits from the current situation is Microsoft I think. Apache could just announce that people should use Libreoffice and everything would instantly be improved. But they don't, and there must be a reason for that.
https://openoffice.apache.org/blog/development-update-april-2024.html
Wormius @allwelikeworms@mastodon.social@williampietri @loke I've seen complaints like this - where people commit dumb little things to projects not actually code that 'matters'...
The explanation I heard was similar to what you said, basically "to show on a resume/prove you're a "real" coder by all those amazing commits you make (and hope nobody actually looks at the commit logs/commits themselves, just the green dots)).
@loke Exactly. People should contact apache@apache.org and ask them why they keep distributing OpenOffice despite the security issues, and pretend to keep the project alive with meaningless Git commits that remove whitespaces. Try contacting them!
@frumble@chaos.social@loke @libreoffice Like I said three years ago: I do no more rule out Microsoft involvement in #OpenOffice life support.
@loke @libreoffice "The only explanation I have is that they have some contract where someone is paying them money for it to be updated"
I find that hard to believe. Whenever somebody turns up on their development mailing list wondering why they bother continuing when LibreOffice clearly won years ago, their response seems to be to belittle LibreOffice for having so many paid developers and thus progressing much faster, while Apache OO is all volunteers, and thus better even if stagnant.