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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."
I can vouch for this... the OO.org 2.0 beta has so far required non-RPM Linux users (or those who want to have a single-user installation of the beta version) to build from source--and I can say that it is a frightening endevour! (This coming from one who has built Gnome from source in the past and who is still daunted by the prospect of building OO.org)[1].
I was recently looking at open source projects that I might contribute to, and-- in my case at least --OO.org was counted out on the basis of build complexity. Cloudscape and other projects are where I've been putting my free time simply because becoming a 'casual contributor' to OO.org seems to be an unduly complicated process.
The solution? Simlplify the build process for the casual coder. This will have the added benefit of helping other Linux distros and UNIX versions more easily support bleeding edge OO.org. And on the development side, potential contributors of the odd functionality (as I would characterise myself) will not be scared off.
As I understand it (probably imperfectly), Linux has gone through the same growing pains in arriving at its current module architecture. I think this is a housekeeping step OpenOffice.org needs to dedicate resources to, and needs to dedicate them NOW, to clean things up to at least the level of the what the 1.x versions had where it was easy to compile[&|]install a single-user version, unlike the 2.Xs where it's a real workout.
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[1] And this is also from one who also has no problem with contributing Java code despite the recently publicised Java issues in OO.org 2.0.
Yeah, I was just lookin' at their "solver". Pfft. All well and good for developers but the user's options are basically install-OpenOffice-or-not. It's not like GNOME doesn't have the exact same issues. The problem there is solved by the packagers who make apt and rpm dependancy trees. Of course, what's going to happen is that people are going to keep contributing to other projects and they will soon supercede anything OpenOffice has to offer simply because they are easier for people to get.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'd like to see the hardest stuff done in C or something else a bit (faster and) more debuggable than C++ and invoked from a Ruby shell.
Wait a minute - you think the solution to a lack of developers is to switch from a mainstream language to what is, if you'll forgive the intrusion of cruel reality, a language known only by a vanishingly small minority of coders, which has a reputation for being very slow (not good for desktop apps) and for not being able to do Unicode (not good for office apps)?
As I suspect you're the only person in the world who thinks rewriting the OOo framework in Ruby would be a good idea... well, it's down to you. You'd better get cracking, it's gonna take a while. I look forward to seeing the results: Ruby needs a big impressive project like this to lift it out of the "toy language" backwater it's stuck in.
They certainly have a worse public image than IBM, and I wonder if people use OO because its free, but don't really feel part of the project because the SUN associtaions.
It seems to me that IBM and others (like Oracle), aren't playing nicely with SUN so much.Which is all a bit of a pity, because OpenOffice is the single main application that advances Linux as a useful OS on the desktop.