Is it time to unplug frail OpenOffice's life support? Apache Project asked to mull it over

[steven36]

Software hit by dev drought: Patch it or lose it

 

 

The Apache OpenOffice project has limited capacity for sustaining itself in an energetic manner. The retirement of the project is a serious possibility.

 

Those are the words of Dennis Hamilton, the volunteer vice-president of OpenOffice who advises the Apache Software Foundation board. Yesterday, he publicly floated the idea of possibly shutting down the software suite because there just aren't enough developers working on the code, and security bugs aren't being dealt with.

In his openoffice-dev mailing list post, Hamilton wrote:

 

I have regularly observed that the Apache OpenOffice project has limited capacity for sustaining the project in an energetic manner. It is also my considered opinion that there is no ready supply of developers who have the capacity, capability, and will to supplement the roughly half-dozen volunteers holding the project together. It doesn't matter what the reasons for that might be.

 

In the case of Apache OpenOffice, needing to disclose security vulnerabilities for which there is no mitigation in an update has become a serious issue ... It is remiss of me not to point out that retirement of the project is a serious possibility.

 

There are those who fear that discussing retirement can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. My concern is that the project could end with a bang or a whimper. My interest is in seeing any retirement happen gracefully. That means we need to consider it as a contingency. For contingency plans, no time is a good time, but earlier is always better than later.

 

On the topic of OpenOffice security bugs, Hamilton shed some light on the handling of CVE-2016-1513, a vulnerability that can be exploited by a malicious presentation document to execute code on a machine when opened. It was reported in October, around the release of OpenOffice 4.1.2. A fix was developed in March although there was no rush to patch the public source code because there was a fear internally that miscreants would spot the commit and realize it was exploitable. Instead, the OpenOffice team held onto the fix to sneak it into an official point release.

 

The person who found and reported the hole grew impatient, and said they would have no choice but to go public to protect users. In July, the OpenOffice team announced there was an exploitable bug, there was no stable patch ready to roll, and the workaround was: use another office suite.

 

The vulnerability will be addressed either in version 4.1.3, a maintenance release, or the 4.2.0 feature release both due later this year. If you can't wait, there's a hotfix to apply manually.

 

Things like this have got Hamilton worried that the open-source suite will crumble rather than gracefully close down. One way out is to put the software into archive mode: no further commits will be accepted, code will remain online for people to fork, and no further releases will be made.

 

This is all at the discussion stage at the moment: the Apache foundation board has not yet taken any decision on the fate of OpenOffice.

 

While OpenOffice suffers from a slow release cycle, has been described as "all but dead" by a Red Hat engineering manager, and has been thoroughly overtaken by the lively LibreOffice fork, programmers working on the code were quick to defend the project from the cyber grim reaper.

 

"Wow, just wow," chimed in source contributor Phillip Rhodes.

 

"I have to say, I think even broaching this topic is a mistake. 'Self-fulfilling prophecy'? Not even that, it'll be a 'third party fulfilling prophecy' as soon as this hits the press. There are a lot of people out there who seem to have it in for Apache OpenOffice and have for a while.

 

"Now you know there will be a headline appearing in the next week, reading 'Apache OpenOffice Mulls Retirement' or 'Apache OpenOffice Begins To Wind Down', etc. Yeah, it's crappy journalism, but it's almost 100 per cent certain to happen. And that's just going to dampen enthusiasm even more.

 

"I wish I could say I had a magic bullet of an answer for how to get things moving again, but I don't. But I don't think opening a discussion about retirement and giving OpenOffice's enemies more ammunition is a strong tactical move.

 

Source:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/02/openoffice_retirement/

 

[straycat19]

3 hours ago, steven36 said:

"Now you know there will be a headline appearing in the next week, reading 'Apache OpenOffice Mulls Retirement' or 'Apache OpenOffice Begins To Wind Down', etc. Yeah, it's crappy journalism, but it's almost 100 per cent certain to happen. And that's just going to dampen enthusiasm even more.

 

"I wish I could say I had a magic bullet of an answer for how to get things moving again, but I don't. But I don't think opening a discussion about retirement and giving OpenOffice's enemies more ammunition is a strong tactical move.

 

The only people against free software is Microsoft.  If Open Office became a huge success Office would bite the dust.  I really am not concerned about the flaws they find in Open Office for several reasons.  Mainly because they require the opening of a bad actor in order to exploit the flaw.  And the only place bad actors come from is bad emails that you shouldn't open anyway.  Granted the LIbre Office fork is doing well and other than bad publicity I think Open Office has done quite well considering the small group of people who are working on it and improving it, though slowly.  It would be to our benefit if we supported Open Office and its developers in any way we can, just to ensure it stays viable.

[pc71520]

Luckily, the Libre and WPS Office Suites keep advancing themselves.

[Batu69]

But That’s OK Because We Have LibreOffice

There’s a shortage of active devs, vice president announces

   OpenOffice could go dark because of the lack of developer interest

 

OpenOffice, which is generally known as one of the first real Microsoft Office alternatives available with a freeware license, is close to going dark because the project can no longer attract the interest of volunteer developers who can support future updates.

In a mailing list for members, volunteer Vice President Dennis E. Hamilton explains that the team is considering retirement of OpenOffice for the first time, as delivering security fixes and updates on a regular basis has become a serious issue because of the lack of manpower.

“I have regularly observed that the Apache OpenOffice project has limited capacity for sustaining the project in an energetic manner. It is also my considered opinion that there is no ready supply of developers who have the capacity, capability, and will to supplement the roughly half-dozen volunteers holding the project together. It doesn't matter what the reasons for that might be,” he said.

And while Hamilton doesn’t want to name the reasons that contributed to OpenOffice losing developer interest, one of the causes is certainly the mass migration to LibreOffice, another Microsoft Office alternative that’s enjoying a terrific success these days.

Many companies, organizations, and state departments have replaced Microsoft Office with LibreOffice in an attempt to cut costs and step away from Microsoft software. LibreOffice has been chosen as the alternative mainly because of its performance, as it offers very advanced document tools that are similar to the ones bundled into Microsoft’s productivity solution.

One month to patch security flaw

As a result, OpenOffice has become a solution that’s attracting only minimal developer interest, and this downward trend is confirmed by a recent security flaw that was patched only a month after it was discovered. The OpenOffice team recommended users to switch to LibreOffice or Microsoft Office to remain secure, mostly because there weren’t enough developers to help patch the issue. The latest update for OpenOffice was released in October 2015 while LibreOffice received an update on August 29, 2016.

“It is remiss of me not to point out that retirement of the project is a serious possibility. There are those who fear that discussing retirement can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. My concern is that the project could end with a bang or a whimper. My interest is in seeing any retirement happen gracefully. That means we need to consider it as a contingency. For contingency plans, no time is a good time, but earlier is always better than later,” Hamilton added.

And yet, not everyone sees retirement as the only way to go. Member Phillip Rhodes explained in a reply that the OpenOffice team should rather look into ways to attract contributors than to consider retirement. He also proposes other solutions, such as dropping Mac support temporarily in order to focus on Windows, and emphasizes that the team should “think outside the box a little and see if there are some other ideas we could adopt.”

In the meantime, the LibreOffice team is working at super fast pace to deliver updates, and this translates to a continuously increasing number of downloads on all supported platforms. LibreOffice has become the top alternative to Microsoft Office, and indirectly, it has turned into one of the killers of the original OpenOffice project

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