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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: 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.