I am actually looking forward to hearing from the people here. Yeah Low-effort I know.

But I think this is an important topic to discuss, considering how much of the FOSS community is kept afloat by unpaid & volunteer-labour.

I am especially looking forward to any discussions of possible solutions

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    17 hours ago

    Yeah, not great. You always hope that projects under a larger foundation, like GNOME, have a higher bus factor¹, but unless that foundation has dispensible income to pay someone, you’re ultimately still reliant on volunteers and not many people volunteer for maintenance.

    What the foundation can do, though, which is also really important, is to hand over the keys to a new maintainer, should you disappear over night.
    Like, yeah, forking is great, but some people will never learn of the fork. It happens about once a year that I find someone online who’s still using OpenOffice and that project has been practically dead since 2011.
    So, I do hope we can get more open-source projects under some sort of umbrella. No idea how to actually do that, though. I also have open-source projects where I would not even know where to start to get them under some organization…

    • Diurnambule@jlai.lu
      3·
      11 hours ago

      … Open office is dead ? I installed it least than an year ago on my parent computer…

      • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        9 hours ago

        Ah shit, here we go again.

        I almost expected someone to learn that just from me posting. 😅

        Basically, OpenOffice used to be organized by Sun Microsystems. Then Sun got bought by Oracle back in 2010.
        Oracle does not have a good reputation at all, so the OpenOffice devs from back then figured they’d need to take things into their own hands and set up The Document Foundation to organize further development. But the OpenOffice trademark was owned by Sun/Oracle, so they had to rename and get a new homepage and everything. The name they chose is LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/

        After the OpenOffice project was effectively dead, Oracle handed it and its trademark over to the Apache Foundation, where it’s seeing occasional bug fixes. But to my knowledge, they don’t even have the capacity to fix all the security problems.
        All the actual feature development happens over on the LibreOffice side.

        So, in practice, if you want OpenOffice, what you really want is LibreOffice.