Opening the Potential of OpenOffice.org

[vmlinuz] writes "O'Reillynet is running an article about 'Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org' which explores how anyone can contribute to argubly one of the most important Open Source projects. The article also discusses the importance of a shorter release cycle."

Comments

Mmm

[Saiyine]

Strange, the submitter and the article writer share names.

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Suggestion: copy mozilla and break up suite

[solferino]

My suggestion is just to follow the mozilla phoenix/firebird/firefox approach and break the suite up and develop the components separately.

Break off the wordprocessor and strip it back to essential functionality as was done with phoenix 0.1. Go for a rapid release cycle again as happened with phoenix with new updates at least every month. This will reinject vitality into the project. The full office suite will still be available as Mozilla is to this day.

The essential thing that Mozilla had was the gecko rendering engine and XUL. None of this was lost in moving to single app development. The essential thing that OpenOffice has is its well-developed ability to read/write MS office file formats and its own OpenDoc format. This also would not be lost by splitting off the wordprocessor.

The Office suite as a monolithic application was really a marketing innovation, not something that was user driven. Let's free ourselves of the unwieldy bloat it has given us.

I tried...

[rongage]

I tried to contribute to the OOo project on the marketing team. It was incredibly difficult to be taken seriously when your "product" moniker could not be distinguished from a web site.

I tried to contribute to the OOo project by submitting valid and repeatable bug reports but I was told that getting label and envelope printing working CORRECTLY was a feature request, not a bug, and would not be addressed in the upcoming release.

I tried to contribute to the OOo project but could not because the software build system REQUIRES PAM so I could not build the current tree (Slackware user). I WAS going to work on a stand alone viewer for Impress.

I would love to contribute to OOo, but the OOo team seems to want to make things as difficult as possible for outsiders to come in. Why on Earth would an Office Suite need PAM???

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[QuantumRiff]

As Much as I hate to admit it, Access should be on that list as well. Knowledgeable managers use Excell to connect to databases, and pull the data they want out for reports. Many, many other managers use Access, connect to the "real" backend database, and use QBE (Query By Example) to generate their reports. Also, many small businesses seem to think it is a real database.