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Well, it's always been 'bloated', more in its startup time then anything else. When it starts up it needs to load like 100MB of shared libraries, as well as perform font caching on Linux systems, query the print system, etc. etc. etc. This code is really an example of how templates can be used for evil, not good, leading to the bloat.

It was already donated to open source in its bloated state by Sun/StarDivision, but it's much less bloated now then it used to be in StarOffice 5.2. It used to have its own implementation of a web browser in 5.2, for chrissesake.

That said, in 1.0 launch times can take upwards of minutes on some machines. So in essence, while the better solution in the long run may be to remove bloat, the progress bar is a welcome addition. I've had to do user support for a lot of newbies who are wondering if the software's really crashed after seeing the static splashscreen for 20 seconds, force quit the software, try launching again, waiting another 20, and so on like the the instructions on my shampoo. Seeing something happen or a progress bar that hasn't finished all the way wil at least let these users know that "yes, startup time is crap" instead of thinking "crap, it doesn't work and I need help".

And as to removing bloat once it's in there, look to Mozilla for an example of how successful it can be on an old crufty code base. And OOo is over four times as large. It'll definitely take time. Meanwhile, use ooqstart or change your work habits a bit (towards bottom of thread) to make getting to that word processing document when you need it now a bit snappier.

1. OpenOffice.org 1.1 RCs are not available for OS X. We just got it compiling a few days ago. And it'll require much more work then simply compiling it, such as testing, integration with the asian fonts and input methods, etc.

   Want it faster? Well, there's only so much two guys can do. We just finished our first full Gold Master release just two weeks ago and man, we need a vacation!

2. Our OpenOffice.org Mac version is X11 based. It looks identical to using the Win32 version. It's functional, not pretty.

   Its installer will help a Mac X11 neophyte through the process of setting up an X11 environment. It's also got the Start OpenOffice.org project to allow you to launch it like a normal Mac application and do document associations (e.g. double clicking an OOo doc opens it up!).

3. The Aquanative porting work is being undertaken in the NeoOffice project, not within OpenOffice.org. NeoOffice is a free software GPL version of OpenOffice.org.

   Two native versions are in the works, NeoOffice (Cocoa) and NeoOffice/J (Java2D...only for UI, it's still 99% C++! It's the shoddy C++ that's slow, not Java!).

   Because of political issues of submitting patches and difficulty modifying code owned by the gsl project, it's difficult to do this work within OpenOffice.org. We're also trying to take the project in directions that Sun doesn't want to take StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org really is just the StarOffice development team with its own motivations needed to keep their jobs...and helping a bunch of free software dudes isn't one of them. As sucn, there may unfortunately never be an official OpenOffice.org Aqua port with a true Mac UI.

4. We're moving NeoOffice up to 1.1, but have to get OOo compiling first. Not enough people are helping out to allow us to focus on the fun stuff, so we've got to do the grunt work as well.

5. We're working as hard as we can (c'mon, we're not paid!), and you should keep your pantyhose on. OpenOffice.org 1.1 Developer Preview for MacOS X shall be coming soon (e.g. we've had time to stop committing patches and make a really rough really untested binary). And also coming down the pike is another binary of NeoOffice/J with full Japanese support, both for input as well as localization!

1. OpenOffice.org 1.1 RCs are not available for OS X. We just got it compiling a few days ago. And it'll require much more work then simply compiling it, such as testing, integration with the asian fonts and input methods, etc.

   Want it faster? Well, there's only so much two guys can do. We just finished our first full Gold Master release just two weeks ago and man, we need a vacation!

2. Our OpenOffice.org Mac version is X11 based. It looks identical to using the Win32 version. It's functional, not pretty.

   Its installer will help a Mac X11 neophyte through the process of setting up an X11 environment. It's also got the Start OpenOffice.org project to allow you to launch it like a normal Mac application and do document associations (e.g. double clicking an OOo doc opens it up!).

3. The Aquanative porting work is being undertaken in the NeoOffice project, not within OpenOffice.org. NeoOffice is a free software GPL version of OpenOffice.org.

   Two native versions are in the works, NeoOffice (Cocoa) and NeoOffice/J (Java2D...only for UI, it's still 99% C++! It's the shoddy C++ that's slow, not Java!).

   Because of political issues of submitting patches and difficulty modifying code owned by the gsl project, it's difficult to do this work within OpenOffice.org. We're also trying to take the project in directions that Sun doesn't want to take StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org really is just the StarOffice development team with its own motivations needed to keep their jobs...and helping a bunch of free software dudes isn't one of them. As sucn, there may unfortunately never be an official OpenOffice.org Aqua port with a true Mac UI.

4. We're moving NeoOffice up to 1.1, but have to get OOo compiling first. Not enough people are helping out to allow us to focus on the fun stuff, so we've got to do the grunt work as well.

5. We're working as hard as we can (c'mon, we're not paid!), and you should keep your pantyhose on. OpenOffice.org 1.1 Developer Preview for MacOS X shall be coming soon (e.g. we've had time to stop committing patches and make a really rough really untested binary). And also coming down the pike is another binary of NeoOffice/J with full Japanese support, both for input as well as localization!

I think this all of the other detriments noted in the comments are to be expected when comparing a product that's been in development for near 20 years against a project that became open source only a few years ago. If you're evaluating OpenOffice.org as a replacement for Microsoft Office on Win32, chances are it will fail. It's much more then simply a Win32 Office replacement. For example, OOo has:

• support of alternative platforms - Now users on Solaris, FreeBSD, Tru64, IRIX, DarwinPPC, LinuxPPC, LinuxARM, and other platforms still to come can use their computers in a corporate setting. I doubt Microsoft will ever release Office for any of those platforms.
• Unicode support - Unicode is pervasive in the entire suite, and vertical/right-to-left language support is coming in 1.1. It can be diffiicult to do full Unicode editing in MS Office (at least on a Mac)
• Language support - You can use OpenOffice.org on a Mac with the interface completely translated into Greek. There are other translations into languages like Estonian, with more being added each day. Microsoft probably won't translate Office into every language, and the entire world doesn't speak English.
• Full XML support - XML support is a key in OOo 1.0, and uncompressed XML is in 1.1. And the schemas are public. One of the provisions of the SISSL license is that closed source derivatives, like StarOffice, must adhere to the public schemas. This means if you're doing a document content storage & retrieval system, you can store OOo XML documents without losing formatting as is the case with the Office XML exporters in development.
• Free - Aunt Jane and Uncle Bob shouldn't be forced to pay $300 just to type a resume. And with the advent of Office XP product activation and Office v.X network licensing, it's nice to know there's an alternative that you can use to get your work done on time for a deadline even when your company's run out of licenses!
• Open source - If you don't like something with it or want to enhance it, you can...if a bug is irking you, you can fix it...that is, if you're willing to trudge through the source. NeoOffice is an example GPL variant that is working to port to Cocoa, and other projects are underway to port to XUL and other platforms.

Is OOo ready to replace MS Office? No. For certain users, however, it provides options that simply didn't exist before OOo, and options that Microsoft will probably never provide. Complaints about OOo are fine and dandy, but don't overlook the strengths that it provides today and the options that it's given to thousands of users Microsoft has no intention of supporting.

If you're intrepid enough to compile the sucker (takes over a day) you'll find the icons are simply windows .bmp formatted files that you can replace with whatever you want. This results in the creation of an alternate set of .res files that you can then drop into any OOo distribution. This is the approach that Ximian uses to bundle a different icon set into their 'enhanced' OpenOffice.org included with Ximian Desktop.

It is also possible to use completely alternative widget sets with OOo, as illustrated by the NeoOffice port using Cocoa widgets and Carbon-rendered widgets (screenshots of Neo vs. Office v.X). This approach, however, is still only available to GPL versions of OOo.

If you've got better ideas as to how to achieve cross-platform compatibility and skinning while maintaining the identical look and feel requirement Sun has, stop by the Graphics System Layer project and lend a hand!

And if you're an intrepid graphics designer (who knows a few other intrepid graphics designers...) and would like to make an alternative icon set for the approximately 1000 icons, please pipe up and help us out! Parts of our icon set are the direct result of the truism that programmers are definitely not graphics artists, and others are relics from when Star Division was busy mimicing Win95/Office97. Our community development can only provide the features the community wants if folks volunteer, else OpenOffice.org will continue to gain only the features Sun believes are needed for selling StarOffice, not necessarily those wanted by the user base of its free cousin.

If you're intrepid enough to compile the sucker (takes over a day) you'll find the icons are simply windows .bmp formatted files that you can replace with whatever you want. This results in the creation of an alternate set of .res files that you can then drop into any OOo distribution. This is the approach that Ximian uses to bundle a different icon set into their 'enhanced' OpenOffice.org included with Ximian Desktop.

It is also possible to use completely alternative widget sets with OOo, as illustrated by the NeoOffice port using Cocoa widgets and Carbon-rendered widgets (screenshots of Neo vs. Office v.X). This approach, however, is still only available to GPL versions of OOo.

If you've got better ideas as to how to achieve cross-platform compatibility and skinning while maintaining the identical look and feel requirement Sun has, stop by the Graphics System Layer project and lend a hand!

And if you're an intrepid graphics designer (who knows a few other intrepid graphics designers...) and would like to make an alternative icon set for the approximately 1000 icons, please pipe up and help us out! Parts of our icon set are the direct result of the truism that programmers are definitely not graphics artists, and others are relics from when Star Division was busy mimicing Win95/Office97. Our community development can only provide the features the community wants if folks volunteer, else OpenOffice.org will continue to gain only the features Sun believes are needed for selling StarOffice, not necessarily those wanted by the user base of its free cousin.

They're working on it.

http://www.neooffice.org/

If you want to run openoffice without X, try the (very) beta NeoOffice.

No guarantees, I haven't even tried this, and /. may kill it, but try here. Google cached it here.

hmm...interesting subtext: openoffice.org is released under the LGPL and SISSL which allow for closed source extensions to the source base and commercialization. According to the next to last NeoOffice FAQ entry the prototype is under the full GPL license and Sun employees know they can't use its source code directly.

Is this the first salvo in a free source vs. open source war?

hmm...interesting subtext: openoffice.org is released under the LGPL and SISSL which allow for closed source extensions to the source base and commercialization. According to the next to last NeoOffice FAQ entry the prototype is under the full GPL license and Sun employees know they can't use its source code directly.

Is this the first salvo in a free source vs. open source war?

The link above should be http://www.neooffice.org.

Umm...neooffice does seem to be using AppKit but not extensively yet. Check out the introduction in the build instructions. Now if only it could use interface builder...

Next week, public beta of the X11 release for Darwin 6, Mac OS X 10.2.

This is still the X11 version. Sure, it'll be nice to try it, but it won't have Mac look and feel, and certainly won't obey the Human Interface Guidelines yet. It seems that the Aqua demo was of NeoOffice, which is just a proof of concept for developers, not a real distribution.

NeoOffice is a mildly functional prototype office suite used for exploring technologies for use in OpenOffice.org. It is not a distribution and not in active development. It is a sandbox for testing out potentially unstable and ugly technologies that are not appropriate for a maintainable source base.

Looks like there's a lot more work to be done...

It _is_ omniweb, however the screendump is not this new release. See http://www.neooffice.org/ for more details.