What's next for Apache OpenOffice

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Concerns about the viability of the Apache OpenOffice (AOO) project are not new; they had been in the air for a while by the time LWN looked at the project's development activity in early 2015. Since then, though, the worries have grown more pronounced, especially after AOO's recent failure to produce a release with an important security fix nearly one year after being notified of the vulnerability. The result is an internal discussion on whether the project should be "retired," or whether it will find a way to turn its fortunes around.

The current chair of the AOO project management committee (PMC) is Dennis Hamilton, whose term is set to end shortly. He has been concerned about the sustainability of the project for some time (see this message from one year ago, for example), a concern sharpened by the routine requirement that he report to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) board on the project's status. The board, seemingly, had asked few questions about the status of AOO until recently, when the handling of CVE-2016-1513 (or the lack thereof) came to its attention. Now the board is apparently asking some sharp questions indeed and requiring monthly (rather than every three months as usual) reports from the project. "Retirement" of the project, it seems, has been explicitly mentioned as a possibility.

Pondering retirement

In response, on September 1, Hamilton went to the AOO development list with a detailed description of what retiring the project would involve. He said:

I have regularly observed that the Apache OpenOffice project has limited capacity for sustaining the project in an energetic manner. It is also 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.

Given that, he said, it is time to openly face the prospect that AOO is not sustainable and needs to be wound down. ASF board member (and corporate vice president) Jim Jagielski added that "it has become obvious to the board that AOO has not been a healthy project for some time." Given that, he said, the important thing is to figure out what is to be done now.

This conversation has been widely reported; the result, unsurprisingly, has been a strong "we told you so" response. There has been quite a bit of rehashing of the history of the AOO project and how the current situation came to be. But Jagielski had a point when he said that most of that does not matter; what does matter is what happens next. Your editor would agree. There may be an opportunity to make things better for developers and users of free office suites, but doing so may require forgiving and forgetting quite a bit of unpleasant history.

Jagielski suggested that, while the project cannot sustain itself as an end-user-focused effort, it may be able to go forward as a framework that others could build applications with. Who those others would be was not specified. He suggested that the OpenOffice.org domain could be redirected to LibreOffice — a suggestion that still seems to be seen as heretical by many in the AOO project.

To top things off, he even said that the project might consider making an apology of sorts for the excesses of one of its advocates in the past. While his tone might be read as being less than fully sincere, one would hope that any such apology, should it be forthcoming, would be taken at its word and accepted fully. LibreOffice developers could even consider making an apology of their own (they have not been 100% perfect either), perhaps ahead of anything from AOO. The sharing of some conciliatory words could do a lot to end the hostilities of past years, enable cooperation, and bring about a solution that is good for everybody involved.

Pondering non-retirement

The above discussion, like much of the conversation on the net as a whole, has an underlying assumption that AOO will, indeed, wind down. The project has been unable to compete with LibreOffice; its commit volume and developer participation are not just lower, they are two orders of magnitude lower. LibreOffice makes regular feature and maintenance releases; AOO has been unable to put out even a single emergency security-fix release. LibreOffice has significant corporate investment driving its development; AOO, seemingly, has none since IBM ceased its involvement. The current AOO development community is too small to even hope to fully understand its (large) code base, much less make significant improvements to it. So, to many, it seems clear that AOO is not sustainable.

There are, however, AOO developers who disagree with this assessment. Some of them clearly think that AOO can be saved and saw Hamilton's message as something close to an act of sabotage. Others saw it as "liberating" and as a way to kickstart the process of bringing in new developers. AOO's remaining community has a clear attachment to the project and a strong lack of desire for any kind of accommodation with LibreOffice. It was said by a few that AOO provides an important competition for LibreOffice, though what form that competition takes when the project has not made a feature release for 2.5 years is not clear.

What is clear is that AOO needs to bring in more developers if it is going to survive. To that end, a new recruitment mailing list has been created to help new developers get started. Plans are forming to try to turn the current round of publicity into a call for developers to join a reinvigorated AOO project. Jagielski has claimed that "AOO has simply been overloaded w/ emails from developers and other contributors offering their help, skills, talents and support" since the discussion started, but that overload is not yet evident on the mailing lists.

The developers involved must surely be aware of just how big a challenge they face. Many office-suite users may not have heard of LibreOffice, but the development community is well aware of the relative health of the two projects; attracting them will continue to be hard. The state of the code base, which has not seen the sort of energy put in by LibreOffice to make development easier, will not help. There is no financial investment going into AOO and, seemingly, no plans to try to attract any; if a company did come in, it would likely end up dominating the project in short order — a situation with its own problems.

AOO also has an interesting problem that is not shared by many other projects: it is subject to the decisions of a foundation board of directors that is concerned about potential damage to the overall Apache brand. Even if the AOO developers feel they are making progress, the possibility of the board pulling the plug on them is real. As board member Greg Stein recently said, "PMCs do *not* want the Board involved ... it rarely turns out well for them." Should such a thing happen to AOO, its developers would still have the source, of course, but would lose access to the ASF's resources and, probably, the OpenOffice brand. With such a cloud hovering over them, it is not surprising that AOO developers are concerned and asking for more time.

So the challenge is real. But one thing should be kept in mind here: the free-software community is famous for proceeding in the face of "you can't possibly accomplish that" criticism and proving the critics wrong. A quick look back at what was said about the GNU project in the 1980s, or Linux in the early 1990s, will drive that lesson home. One should never underestimate what a small group of determined developers can do. If the AOO developers think they can muster the resources to manage their code base, they should probably be given the space — by the ASF board and the world as a whole — to try.

The board, though, would be right to want some specific milestones to demonstrate that the project is back in good health and able to meet its users' needs. Apache OpenOffice cannot continue to distribute software that it cannot fix and cannot keep secure, using a well-known trademark to keep up a user base that may be unaware that there is little underneath. One way or another, that is a situation that needs to be fixed.

It is rare for the community to talk overtly about shutting down a project; usually, projects either just fade away or they are killed by a parent company with little warning. It is the type of discussion that we naturally tend to shy away from. But, like people, projects have a life cycle and do not last forever. Facing up to that cycle can motivate developers to rejuvenate a project or, at worst, can help minimize the pain caused by a shutdown. The AOO project has thus begun an important conversation; quite a bit rides on how it ends.

