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Comment by kerblang | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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/

How is "really dead" determined?

> When should a project move to the Attic?

> 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.

PMC = Project Management Committee

The project chairs vote to close the project.

Apache could at least put a "use LibreOffice instead" notice at https://www.openoffice.org/. Why not?

I use several Apache libraries that are getting pretty old. But so is my code. So I'm glad that they keep things around a long time.

Still, I think it might be good to have more warning for the consumer-facing tools.

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.

So, yeah, you make a perfectly valid point.

That they're not keeping up with LibreOffice

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.

I see - my bad. Ignore the first paragraph, then. Second half still applies I think :D

The problem is that the users are going to AOO for historical reason (brand recognition, basically), and getting a drastically outdated product.

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.

They do declare projects dead. They even have a place for them https://attic.apache.org/

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