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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 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]