SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
OpenOffice may not last much longer as many of its former developers have jumped ship to LibreOffice:
OpenOffice, once the premier open source alternative to Microsoft Office, could be shut down because there aren't enough developers to update the office suite. Project leaders are particularly worried about their ability to fix security problems.
An e-mail thread titled, "What would OpenOffice retirement involve?" was started yesterday by Dennis Hamilton, vice president of Apache OpenOffice, a volunteer position that reports to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) board. "It is 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," Hamilton wrote.
No decisions have been made yet, but Hamilton noted that "retirement of the project is a serious possibility," as the Apache board "wants to know what the project's considerations are with respect to retirement."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 03 2016, @02:43AM
So says the drones who don't care about Microsoft abusing a monopoly position.
Hey, why don't you explain how OO/LO is inferior to Microsoft's offerings? You DO REALIZE that Microsoft's own software fails to read, and sometimes destroys, documents produced by previous versions of the same software?
At least OO/LO don't destroy documents that it is incapable of working with. In fact, OO/LO can and does work with documents that Microsoft's own software cannot.
Tell me, drone - how's that Windows 10 telemetry working out for you?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Saturday September 03 2016, @10:16AM
Drone....ROFL butthurt much? You DO know when you act like that you come off like this guy [penny-arcade.com] and that REALLY doesn't help your case....yes?
Look you are gonna have to face a cold hard fact....you lost. Privacy is dead because the public is a bunch of self involved narcissist twits that don't even have the fucking sense not to post that pic of the person they are cheating with on FB or write about the most dirty details of their life on Twitter because they all have their heads so far up their collective asses the stomach acid is giving them split ends.
I'm sorry to be the one that has to break the news to ya but outside the server space, which just FYI is dying fast thanks to these megahosts like Amazon that can run half the world's businesses from some warehouse with a couple guys? Linux is dead man, its over. You COULD have gotten together and made a kick ass product back when it mattered but instead everybody had to reinvent the damned wheel and lie to themselves and pretend that 5 bazillion incompatible distros was a good thing and now? MSFT could put out an OS with the fricking Eye Of Sauron as the desktop wallpaper and as long as it was easy for Sam and Sally Self Absorbed to get to their social media they'd be perfectly fine with it.
Hell even the few places where you tried to claim a victory has been totally co-opted by corporate, Google has been running the MSFT "EEE" strategy with Android for years [arstechnica.com] by throwing more and more behind the playwall, quietly cutting support for AOSP, and baking more and more spying....err I mean "telemetry" into the OS....its over man,I mean for fucks sake MSFT put out THREE, count 'em three stinkers in a row...and Linux didn't even gain a single point, not one, because as long as they could be tweeting twits with their social shit nobody gave a single fuck.
So give it the fuck up man, its over, the fat lady is down the street having a sammich and a Pepsi. MSFT will keep their desktops and Office monopolies and spy on the users, Google will keep mobile and spy on the users, and as long as they can sit there and tweet about that great BJ they got last night and how their boss is a fag? The public simply has no fucks to give, they are too busy believing the world should be revolving around them and all their stupid mundane lives has to be broadcast to the world minute by minute to give even a tiny shit.
Fucking depressing isn't it?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday September 03 2016, @12:35PM
+1 ad hominem
+1 TODR
compiling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Saturday September 03 2016, @07:32PM
I see a few people don't like what HF has to say. But he is 100% right. Open source has always been the loosing team. As much as people like myself wanted Linux to win, it just can't compete with corporate greed and an apathetic public who just want facebook, twitter, tumblr, instagram and all the other bullshit that makes them feel better about their minuscule lives. People just want to escape. And they sure as hell don't give a fuck if its via Linux, Android, iOS, OSX, or Windows. Whatever is easier.
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Sunday September 04 2016, @02:38AM
>Open source has always been the [losing] team. [...] an apathetic public who just want facebook, twitter, tumblr, instagram [...]
Have a glance at https://code.facebook.com/projects/ [facebook.com] and https://github.com/facebook [github.com]. Facebook relies heavily on open-source software, and is at least trying to appear to improve that software. The other companies you mentioned also rely heavily on open-source software.
"Evolution of The Twitter Stack [...] Keynote at LinuxCon EU 2013"
--http://www.slideshare.net/caniszczyk/twitter-opensourcestacklinuxcon2013 [slideshare.net]
Tumblr started as a fairly typical large LAMP application. The direction they are moving in now is towards a distributed services model built around Scala, HBase, Redis, Kafka, Finagle, and an intriguing cell based architecture for powering their Dashboard.
--http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr-architecture-15-billion-page-views-a-month-and-harder.html [highscalability.com]
We run Ubuntu Linux 11.04 (“Natty Narwhal”) on Amazon EC2. [...] We run Django [...] Most of our data (users, photo metadata, tags, etc) lives in PostgreSQL [...]
--http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/13649370142/what-powers-instagram-hundreds-of-instances [tumblr.com]
Oracle spent several billion dollars to buy Sun; attempting to have control over MySQL was perceived by some (such as the EU) as a possible motivation for the deal. Microsoft spent a year aggressively trying to give away its latest version of Windows. A sense of insecurity may have motivated those actions.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 06 2016, @02:08AM
It's great that Facebook, Tumblr, or EC2 use opensource. But are their products built on oss opensource? The answer is always no. See, open source is a beast of burden, not a shining star. Always at the bottom of someones stack but the shiny stuff up top is all closed up. Have a look at android. Many of its once open apps have been closed up. Picture open source as the slaves building the pyramids for the Pharaohs such as Apple, FB, Amazon, Google, Micrsoft, etc.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday September 07 2016, @12:13AM
> Picture open source as the slaves building the pyramids [...]
Picture the "pyramids" building "slaves." A recent report about the Linux kernel noted that the changes to it are now overwelmengly corporate contributions:
The Top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the last report include Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, Samsung, SUSE, IBM, Renesas, Google, AMD, Texas Instruments and ARM. [That looks like 11 to me.]
[...]
The volume of contributions from unpaid developers in the period covered by this report has fallen to 7.7% from 11.8% in 2014.
> Have a look at android. Many of its once open apps have been closed up.
I would assume that AOSP remains usable, evan as Google, Amazon and Samsung create suites of proprietary components. A 2014 Seeking Alpha article [seekingalpha.com] notes
[...] cases where “open source” Android once came with a key application available in open source, but then Google orphaned the open source app when it brought out a fully-featured closed-source replacement. This includes the Search, Music, Calendar, Keyboard, Camera and Messaging apps.
An article it cites [arstechnica.com] says that no device sold in China came with Google's proprietary software. Another article (from 2013) [pcmag.com] says that according to Gartner, "41 percent of the Android devices sold in China" ran AOSP. How readily those devices may be reflashed, I don't know. Apparently the prevalence of AOSP devices there is due to governmental prohibition of Google, not to public demand--exactly as you remarked.
> It's great that Facebook, Tumblr, or EC2 use opensource.
I hadn't meant to mention Amazon Web Services as relying on open-source software, but it does.
https://www.linux.com/blog/how-amazon-web-services-uses-linux-and-open-source [linux.com]
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Sunday September 04 2016, @11:23AM
Thanks and like I said its fucking depressing but its a sad truth.
If the Linux community would have gotten their collective shit together at the end of the 90s, when all the nasty shit Gates was doing came out, and put all their effort into a single distro that focused on usability and a GUI exclusive task oriented mentality? They could have taken over the world....but they didn't. Instead they fought amongst themselves, reinvented the wheel a billion times, and decided the solution to every problem should be "open up bash and type this gobbledygook" which to Sam and Sally Average might as well have been an offer of free ass cancer with every install...and now its over.
Social media has driven that final nail in the coffin, the war is over, its just some of them haven't figured it out yet. The users DO NOT CARE that their OS is filled with spyware and adware, DO NOT CARE if it spies on them like the STASI, as long as they can be tweeting twits with their social shit? There is literally nothing MSFT can do at this point that will make people change. The same goes for Google and Apple, they can spy all their little black hearts desire, they can abandon hardware 6 months after release if they feel like it and the users simply will not care as long as they can have their Reddits and Facebooks and Twitter.
Its depressing as hell but its true, we don't need the government to force 1984 upon us, the masses will happily broadcast every single sordid detail about their lives all over the net in a pathetic attempt to get someone to pay attention to them because the younger generations are all completely self involved narcissists with delusions of self importance and fame. I wish it weren't so but look at just what is becoming a weekly occurrence, these fools live streaming the last moments of their miserable lives, because even when staring death in the face they just can't stop desperately trying to get the attention.
This is why its over, users simply do not care about privacy or what their OS is doing as long as it gets them to their social shit, and that other user bringing up what backend Twitter runs on....so fucking what? A handful of guys out of 7 billion plus are running Linux VMs on some megahosts...wow, here is a virtual cookie. The other 6 billion 999 million people on the planet will keep right on using the same OSes they always have, MSFT can be as douchey as they want and still enjoy their desktop and Office monopolies, and likewise Apple and Google can be as dickish as they want and still own the mobile space because users? They just have no fucks to give about what its running on or who makes it, its all about social media and trying to get anybody to notice them...its pathetic, its sad, its depressing as hell...but its the reality we live in now.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 06 2016, @02:57AM
What gets me is how the idiots who think open source has won point to the mega grass fuckers of the industry and shout "Look, they use open source!" (Looks at facbook page) "Where", "There, under the miles of closed source spyware". Whoop-tee-fuckin-do. Nothing but a bunch of idiots who blindly believe that open source is winning because Linux, or some other oss tool is at the bottom of the stack doing invisible work that the 5 year old kid who I saw in home depot glued to a fucking phone watching a video while his family annoyed a sales rep will never give a fuck about.
Open source is merely a tool the got for free built by volunteers for them to build a closed source panopticon on top of it. Sure android has open source parts. But most android handsets are locked up and full of closed source applications. Sure apple uses an open source base and is partly based on Unix bits, but it's as closed source as you can get. Are any of apples top level applications open source? Of course not. Microsoft opened .net? Wow-wee! Now wheres the fucking source code to, lets say paint? Never happening.
And where is my Linux desktop? It still sucks balls. Basic applications that we have had over a decade to build are not there. Just the other day I wanted to record video from my Thinkbook's webcam. I'm running mint so Cheese and Guvcview (what a fucking dumb name) are the two that are mentioned the most and do what I need them to do, record video. Both are complete pieces of shit. Buggy, unfinished garbage is being nice. So after 20+ years, the shining opensource community has these two turds as default video recording software. I had better, more stable video recording software come with my creative Video spigot in 1993 for windows 3.1. But we have a brain dead touch friendly Gnome 3 and Unity along with an idiotic user space init system that grew into useless monster. Pathetic.
Open source: Always the brides maid, never the bride. The beast of burden. What happened to the real holy grail of open source: giving us back full control of our computers? Open source was supposed to free us from Microsoft, Apple and Google. Not enable them! It was supposed to back them into a corner until they admitted defeat and they followed suit and opened their bits for all to modify. It was supposed to free us! But I keep seeing more and more anti free as in speech measures implemented in hardware. And the upper levels of software are locked into using said hardware while it spies away on users who are apathetic. But hey, at least it runs on top of Linux!
Sorry to rant but open source has failed.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday September 06 2016, @08:37AM
Preach brother preach! I have been called every filthy name in the book, gotten death threats, been doxxed, even had a batshit FOSSie stalker for nearly 2 years following me all over the web just so he could post a dozen times "die you fat fucker DIE!" after every post I made for saying the exact same things you just did and I was one of the first fucking advocates for Linux! Hell my first install was fricking Slackware back when you had to order the CDs because the dialup was too damned slow to get 'em and for nearly 3 years I pushed Xandros because they actually got a lot of the shit right like integration with Wine using a nice custom GUI and making an XP style desktop a choice at first startup to help folks switch.
But then I got wise and gave up because as a wise Linux server admin who had given up and gone Mac a few years prior (which last time I talked to him he said he has had less issues running Macs for 10 years than he had running Linux on a desktop for 10 weeks) told me "Linux just doesn't get any better....it just gets different" and ya know what? He's right! The SECOND everything starts firing on all cylinders and it starts getting stable? Well here comes the ripping out of a major system to send the OS back several years! ALSA running stable? Fuck that here's Pulse which to this day is the most brittle fucking thing you can imagine. Hey the desktops look nice and function well? Well screw you here is KDE 4 and GnomeShell with alpha quality code that will take ages to fix and of course we'll make them the default on every major distro while they are still in pre alpha! And now of course you have SystemD (which is owned by Red Hat who used MSFT tactics like shills "embrace the innovation" right out of the Windows 8 playbook, nice bunch) gobbling up functions like Pacman because there were soooo many screaming about the simple and easy to edit init system...oh wait they weren't, RH just wants to push Linux as a VM on top of SystemD but hey a corp is paying attention to us, we must prostrate ourselves and sing their praises!..../facepalm/
And all those corps they keep bragging about,. ya know what Linux is to them? Its fucking DOS, that is ALL it is, some low level shit that has exactly fuck and all to do with their proprietary as all hell business and is only there because it didn't cost anything...that's it, that's all. You don't see any of the companies embracing the four freedoms, hell just the opposite, they are adding more and more consumer hostile DRM and spyware but it doesn't matter to the FOSS crowd because just like the ugly chick at the dance as long as someone pays attention to them they will fawn and defend and sing their praises even as they get shat upon, again see Google and all their shit like the Playwall and how much spying your typical Android phone does. I mean for fucks sake they pulled shit even MSFT didn't have the balls to pull by taking bog standard X86 laptop hardware and baked in enough DRM it can only run a handful of corporate approved OSes and only after major hoop jumping but did you see the FOSS fans have a shitfit at this slap in the face to FOSS? Nope because "Hey it has a Linux kernel that means its doubleplusgood!"...fuck!
That is why I gave up, there is no point wasting time on that dead end. The public will happily embrace 1984 as long as the spybox will take them to Facebook and Linux will continue to not get any better than that first install of Slax back in 99, it'll just be different. So I'll stick with this locked down copy of Win 7 with a copy of 8.1 on hand if I need to swap OSes before the pirates figure out how to strip the spyware out of Windows 10. Because say what you will but at least with Windows I can run software from 10 years ago or the latest and greatest without having to change my fricking kernel, all of my hardware like my webcam and DAW will work without issue, and I don't have to play hardware roulette when I get a new piece of kit. Remember when all the Linux advocates were pushing that one particular wireless card because "it always works in Linux" then Ubuntu crapped all over it? Gee that was fun, or how about when everybody said "oh stick with Intel graphics, those always work" and then Intel came out with PowerVR chipsets? My what will I do now that I don't have to deal with "interesting" challenges like those every time I buy a piece of hardware?
BTW just for shits and giggles since I haven't tried in ages to do video capture and wanted to see if I'd have issues like you did I fired up Moviemaker and had it capture from my camera...nope works perfectly, hell I'm even able to capture right off my VCR with the capture card built into the HP Media Center I use as a netbox as easy as "start VCR, hit record" and thanks to the software that came with my AMD R9 280 I capture all my gameplay footage automatically, it even lets me make highlight reels and upload them if I want so simply a child could do it....man I'm so glad I gave up on Linux, I don't even want to know the amount of hoops and fixes and "open up bash and type" bullshit I'd have to go through to get Linux to do half of those halfass, much less have everything hardware accelerated which came OOTB with my card. I know what straw that finally broke this camel's back was trying to get my DAW to work in Linux without glitches and lag,wanna guess how hard it was to get running in Win 7? Yep just plugged it in, fired up Audacity (which ironically ran like crap on Linux despite being FOSS but runs great on windows) and hit record...tada!
While it sucks that the world will give big bro a big old sloppy kiss because he lets them blather on about their pointless bullshit on social media I can see why the world never gave a shit, I mean if the choice was to go through all the shit I was dealing with the last year I was on Linux trying to get everything to work reliably, or Windows 10? MSFT could spy on me all damned day, at least my software will fricking work.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 06 2016, @03:36PM
Amen.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Sunday September 04 2016, @11:17PM
Open Source DID win... all the companies you mention leverage it to a greater or lesser extent. What lost is Free Software and the ethos that went with it. I don't believe the general public is to blame for this... IMHO coders should own that. Too many bought into the idea that permissive licenses meant that they'd be able to create the next Apple/Google/Amazon, or at least collect a fat cheque by working for such, which was helped by limiting those freedoms so important to the GNU folks. Instead 10-20yrs later many of these coders find themselves part of the great shrinking middle class - insecure or outsourced, perhaps on the scrap heap and locked out of the closed code bases they worked so hard on.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday September 06 2016, @08:53AM
"Open Source DID win"....win WHAT exactly? The right to be the corporate version of DOS? To be the low level shit nobody gives a fuck about while being maintained by "Bob" in Bangalore while the guy that actually wrote the thing has to worry about making his car payment next month, what exactly did they win?
From where I'm sitting they lost, and lost big time. All they did was give a bunch of corps some free shit to build their proprietary DRM riddled empires on while ultimately affecting nothing. MSFT will keep the desktop and office monopolies they had when FOSS started, so no change there, hell if anything their "gift" in the hands of Google turned out to be as good for the people as plague blankets as it was on top of their FOSS DOS that they built the whole "YOU are the product" big brother spyware model that everyone is embracing!
At the end of the day? They changed absolutely nothing, and to me that has to be worse than losing in some big heroic battle, they fought for all those years and accomplished exactly jack and shit, they might as well have not even been.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Tuesday September 13 2016, @10:34PM
So you furiously agree with what I said? Read it again...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @02:02PM
Have you ever tried using Impress? It's terrible, it's very difficult to figure out how to do anything. I have that installed as part of OpenOffice at work (Ubuntu 14.04) and whenever I have to create a slide deck, I go back home and make the slides on PowerPoint from MS Office 2010 that I bought on my own dime.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 03 2016, @02:53PM
I'll be honest - I haven't had to do real office work in decades. Which translates to mean, I've never used an office suite to earn my living. Back then, and "office suite" would have meant an office with a window view, I think. Or, at least a port hole, to look out at the ocean.
I've never used a computer to make a slide presentation. Manually, yes, computerized, no.
I presume that you've been into the documentation, so I won't waste time telling you to RTFM.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @04:13PM
Microsoft is very good at the more tedious aspects of UX. They sit users in front of a PC and have someone ask them to open one of their products and try to perform a certain task, and that person will be watched through a one-way mirror with researchers taking notes.
Another thing MS has lots of money for is testing - extensive testing including both automatic and manual, not just unit tests and mini-tests for feature coverage. They don't say "anyone can download the source and submit a patch", they pay employees to fix them, and MS Office is well staffed because it makes a lot of money.
OTOH Open Office is a "good enough" product. Even before Oracle, nobody cared that much about it, and really good engineers won't sign up to work on it because it's sustaining work by definition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @08:10PM
Don't upgrade to 2013. Suddenly LibreOffice becomes objectively better because 1.) It does not delete content from my documents 2.) It does not prevent users on 2010 from seeing content in my documents.