[rbowen]

The ASF does not tell projects what to do. It provides a process and a place, and gives projects autonomy. The project, not the foundation, decides to keep running the project. So to characterize the ASF as "kicking this can down the road" for some kind of inscrutable motivation is just not how things work.

The members of the OO project want to keep running their project. They have a group of people who keep showing up to do user support, documentation, and produce a huge community around their templates. They just haven't pushed any new features for a while. But they still are there, keeping the lights on.

The ASF is not a top-down organization. It's driven entirely by those projects. And if you look at the dev list - https://lists.apache.org/list.html?[e-mail] - you'll note that this issue gets raised on a VERY regular basis, and the project participants always say "no thanks."

As to "making a deal with LibreOffice", I would encourage you to read the mailing list, where that, too, gets raised with great regularity. There, too, the community sentiment is "no thanks." On both sides.

[davidgerard]

> So to characterize the ASF as "kicking this can down the road" for some kind of inscrutable motivation is just not how things work.

AOO being moribund has come up at ASF board meetings, and they really did just kick this can down the road.

like c'mon, you're literally an ASF guy, you should know this happened

[davefisher-oo]

Read what Rich wrote more carefully. It leterally does not come up often in that context. I got involved with OpenOffice once it came to the Incubator. I've put many many unpaid hours on the project. Mostly by supporting the websites and forum installations, but also by catherding on security.

BTW - You can get help on LibreOffice on the OpenOffice Fora. Those people are there to help people.

I've made $0 on twelve years of work. I am currently the VP, OpenOffice (we rotate because it's a governance role).

If you interested in helping then the type of developer needed is someone who understands old C++ and has a passion to modernize that.

[davidgerard]

> If you interested in helping then the type of developer needed is someone who understands old C++ and has a passion to modernize that.

Adding myself to AOO as a C++ dev would be counter to the interests of the users - it would add to the impression that this dead project was not dead.

You've got pull requests waiting that go back to 2019. Dave, why aren't you pushing or rejecting any of those?

If I was interested in helping I'd be steering people away from the dead security hazard to the live project that has developers. And it turns out I already do that.

The most useful way to help AOO users is to shoot AOO through the head and send them to LibreOffice. AOO doesn't appear to have the devs to maintain a user-facing project securely.

[SSLy]

> The most useful way to help AOO users is to shoot AOO through the head and send them to LibreOffice.

Maybe we could get some bored whitehat to mine some 0days for a few weeks, then send them all at once, wait for inevitable 90 days, and then release high+ severity CVEs.

Purge by fire of a kind.