The "White Label Office" release candidate [LWN.net]

The "White Label Office" release candidate

Posted Dec 27, 2011 21:55 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165)
In reply to: The "White Label Office" release candidate by jmalcolm
Parent article: The "White Label Office" release candidate

It's hard to be sure whether the ASF has been a net contributor to or parasite on the Free Software body. Apache the web server has carried a heavy load, but many ASF activities have been deeply negative: continuing to promote projects that should never have released, or have passed into senescence, or have something to do with Java. Absent these, does ASF have anything to hang its hat on? Spam Assassin lives on as an integration vehicle, and Subversion still serves a purpose in a few places, but that's not much company. "Apache" sounds a lot like "a pasture".

Putting OpenOffice into the Apache project may reasonably be interpreted as simply trash-canning the project. It's easy to see why anyone who still identifies with the OO label would object to such a fate.

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The "White Label Office" release candidate

Posted Dec 27, 2011 22:49 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

By starting from the premise that anything to do with java is deeply negative then sure, you can ignore all of the widely used java frameworks and applications that are under the ASF and makes the bulk of their active projects, but why would you do that unless you had some sort of axe to grind?

Well, RMS was right, after all...

Posted Dec 28, 2011 9:02 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

RMS explaned what's wrong with java long ago. The funny thing is that while he changed the article when IcedTea was released it was quite obviously premature as Oracle later showed.

You can not use Java without fear of reprisal and thus all Apache projects which promote Java should be put in "deeply negative for free software" bin. Sad, but true.

The biggest disappointment here is Android: it's tainted with Java, too - and this is direct result of ASF's work.