Lack Of Developers Delays OpenOffice.org

bonch writes "OpenOffice .org contributors spoke this week at a conference in Canberra. Among other things, one of the issues raised was the lack of developer contributions and a source tree that is 'just too big.' Version 2.0 was originally going to be released around this time but will now be delayed until at least June or July."

Comments

Re:break it up

[Bastian]

This is something that I agree that OO.o sorely needs. I imagine that many users find it particularly annoying that if they want to, say, create a new spreadsheet, they must launch OO.o, which puts them in Writer, then go to File->New Spreadsheet in order to get to Calc. Possibly it is different on other platforms - the OS X port is certainly messy in a lot of other ways - and possibly there is a way to create a set of executables that open different portions of OO.o, which is good. But it's the default behavior on my port, and it's nothing but asinine.

Normally I'm very dedicated to using OSS, and am willing to put up with a rough GUI and give a Free project some slack. But OO.o makes even Microsoft Office seem clean and intelligible, and that's frightening.

In a development culture where there is a very direct connection between loss of user base and loss of developer base, maybe the biggest thing that OO.o needs to do to attract developers is quit focusing so hard on creeping featurism and put some serious time into giving the interface a major overhaul.

Re:break it up

[kosmosik]

> I imagine that many users find it particularly
> annoying that if they want to, say, create a new
> spreadsheet, they must launch OO.o, which puts
> them in Writer, then go to File->New Spreadsheet
> in order to get to Calc.

I don't know what you were using but it is like that:

* On Windows you either choose "New spreadsheet" from quicklaunch menu (one in system tray). Or choose "OpenOffice.org Calc" from Start Menu.

* On Linux it is basically the same - you choose your app from menu or from system tray (but tray option is only limited to KDE, under GNOME you just can have buttons or drawer on panel).

I don't know about Mac builds but AFAIK OOo is not ready for Mac yet. Probably not to many people using OOo on Mac. :\ Too bad because I find it very good piece of software, once you get how it works it is really powerfull.

Re:Mozilla Suite?

[bcrowell]

If you were to break OOo up into smaller parts, then you'd have a word-processor, a spreadsheet, etc. But wait, there are already open-source word-processors (AbiWord, KWord, ...) and open-source spreadsheets (gnumeric, Kspread, ...). So then what would be the reason for OOo to exist? What would make it distinctive?

The article just seems like a clear admission that the whole project was badly conceived from the start. Some things that just seem like obvious blunders to me:

1. The design is monolithic. That drives away developers, makes it practically impossible for mere mortals to compile from source, etc. And what was the reason for designing it to be so monolithic? Just because MS did it that way?
2. It uses Java, a language that has one full, crappy implementation that's not free-as-in-speech (Sun's), and one incomplete implementation that is (gcj). Obviously the lack of a full free-as-in-speech implementation of the language is going to drive away OSS-oriented developers.
3. It's designed to handle MS's .doc format, which is not fully documented, and is subject to change at MS's whim. This is the kiss of death for any open-source project: make yourself completely dependent on a proprietary format/protocol (mumble mumble BitKeeper mumble mumble).

It's not a surprise that almost no OSS-oriented developers outside Sun want to work on OOo. In fact, I'm surprised that anyone cares about it at all.

It's actually kind of an embarrassment that there isn't a single really solid open-source word-processor that runs on Linux. I've tried Abiword, KWord, and Ted. Abiword and KWord crash a lot. Ted is nice, but needs more polish, and maybe a little more functionality (and .rtf is a really nasty format). Please correct me if there's a really good one I'm missing. Probably the lack of serious interest in any other word-processor is due to the existence of OOo. We'd be better off if OOo had never even existed.

Re:I guess I'm one of the four

[Bastian]

Will the community fork OOo becuase of this? Maybe.

Maybe? It's already happened.

Re:I guess I'm one of the four

[LoveMe2Times]

What you *really* ought to thank me for is convincing my employer that OpenOffice.org was the answer, thus letting me work on it. Although, it has taken some dedication on my part or the project would have failed, so thanks :)

Also, I want to re-iterate that I'm hopeful things will improve after the 2.0 crunch. The Powers That Be are not unaware of what's going on, and some effort is being expended to improve things. But 2.0 is a monster that really needs to get out the door, and once that's done will be a good time to revisit some of this.

Magnitude of community effort

[Chemisor]

> Sun is still the largest contributor to the
> project with some 50 developers in Germany,
> followed by Novell with about 10 contributors,
> and only four active community developers. [italics mine]

This gives you an idea what degree of community support an OSS project can expect. Ought to be quite a shock for those who think that they can attract hordes of developers just by opening the source.