![]() ![]() However all they did was to effectively clone Redhat's src rpms/repos, and call it a day. "They should be sued for distributing outdated insecure software" is a fun one-liner, but the ramifications if it would actually happen are huge and almost entirely negative for the Open Source world.Ī few years back, Oracle created OEL, that is, Oracle Enterprise Linux. Plus, do we really want government involved in telling us what software we can and can't put on the internet? Because that's what this would mean. Ignoring a PR would mean risking a lawsuit. Opening up Open Office to a lawsuit also means opening up countless GitHub projects from 15-year olds riddled with SQL injections and the like, but also things I put on my GitHub five years ago and don't really care about. You can find many such almost banal examples, ranging from well-known tools to some project a student uploaded on GitHub that sees basically 0 traffic. Some would define that as "faulty", and it can certainly cause "harm" (a "rm fuckup" is almost a rite of passage). Rm will unapologetically delete files instead of using the "trash bin" semantics that many people are used to. How would you define "faulty" and "harm"? Even if you ignore that and want to talk about a hypothetical situation where it was named something else originally, the project would obviously still be an obscure oddity in the global Microsoft monoculture. But changing the name would only make things worse, by once again wiping out all accrued brand recognition. I think people fixate on the name because that's the easiest thing to change. ![]() I won't say there is zero friction from the word Libre, but it's certainly much smaller than losing all the built-up brand recognition of OpenOffice, and even that is much smaller than the elephant in the room: the ubiquity of Microsoft Office and the trouble any competitor will have no matter what name is used. Just pronounce it like it was English and put on a fake French accent if you want to get fancy with it. ![]() The word looks obviously French, and monolingual English speakers encounter French-looking words often enough that it doesn't give many people pause. I don't know if the French would approve of that pronunciation, but it's good enough for me and seems like an intuitively obvious way for me to pronounce it. ![]() In the case of linux distributions it was less of an issue since they just switched to LibreOffice, but I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice (and possibly taking one look at it and giving up and switching to Office 365).Īpache should have killed OpenOffice years ago but at the very least they should take it down and honestly apologize for fucking this up so badly.Įven ignoring the harm to LibreOffice it's just irresponsible for Apache to keep distributing OpenOffice when they can't even make new releases to simply apply security patches for years. Unfortunately, by taking over the OpenOffice name and absolutely refusing to admit that development has ceased, Apache has caused tons of confusion that has massively harmed libreoffice, because for years people who had heard about "openoffice" would see the terrible, out of date, insecure pile of junk being distributed by the Apache Foundation and not realize that the actively developed LibreOffice was available. Ideally they should have given LibreOffice the OpenOffice name, but even if they had just said "openoffice is dead" then it would have been easy for people to find libreoffice. The worst thing about this was that openoffice was starting to get some name recognition before oracle killed it, and this whole debacle intentionally or unintentionally turned that name recognition into a weapon against LibreOffice. ![]()
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