Slashdot Mirror
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."
If something's in beta, people won't want to use it because it just doesn't sound reliable. If it sounds like a stable, final release, people will be more willing to use it, thereby finding the bugs, thereby resulting in bugfixers, which leads to more reliable software.
Strange, the submitter and the article writer share names.
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Personally I prefer LaTeX and send pdf files. That works ok till I am working alone. But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.
...now that Office 12 has been demoed. That means the specs for OpenOffice.org 4.0 are almost complete!!
I didn't realize that the OpenOffice project had only 100 developers. Many more will be needed to establish the kind of release schedule mentioned in the article. Interesting stuff. Is this a potential weekness of open source - an inability to attract more developers who will donate their time?
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph
And yet you found the need to bold AND italicize the first word of your comment :P
Before you die, you see DoubleRing...
I would agree with more frequent release cycles up to a point; they would have to ensure, however, that they don't begin to mimic M$ by releasing new builds simply for the sake of releasing them just to keep the name fresh in people's minds. Release schedules should only be to either implement beneficial features or to resolve any outstanding issues that benefit the user base as a whole.
This sig is six words long.
YES!
The office suite is the one application that keeps people on Windows! My brother is a lawyer and would love to move his entire staff over to an open source suite (just for financial reasons) but he has to be 100% compatible.
When the office suite becomes a commodity, you'll see more defections.
Agile Artisans
That is really one of the major blocks for most companies to use open source / linux software - lack of a good office suite.
For most companies the majority of computer use is editing documents. Composing proposals, making presentations, writing memos. All you need to do these things is a good word processor. If Linux had a better one companies would ditch MS and use it for the cost savings alone
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
You will find variants of Office on almost every Windows PC used in the business and academic worlds, so it's pretty important.
For me, one of the best features of OpenOffice is its ability to export documents as PDFs. Lovely, lovely feature for creating interoperable documents. Yeah, yeah, I know not everyone likes PDFs, but there are PDF readers for most platforms...
EricJoin my mailing list and win a free book
Can you please explain to this nutjob how I can give my boardroom presentation in vi to maximize visual impact? I really need to get my message through.
"explores how anyone can contribute to argubly one of the most important Open Source projects."
Not the most important project, but one of them..
I think openoffice is just as important as linux anyway. (This is helped because i dont think of linux as *that* important anyway, being a big bsd fan - but thats a discussion for another time). I think if you want people to switch to an open source operating system you need to take it in steps, making programs like firefox and openoffice (which will run on windows inplace of IE and MS Office) a vital part of the plan. Once you have changed all their apps over to open source versions, you can switch the os and all they will notice is a new look.
Paul
C'mon now. One of the most important open source projects in the world? I suppose that assumes that MS Office is one of the most important programs (suite...whatever) in the world? For real?
YES!
The office suite is the one application that keeps people on Windows!
The others were authored by *cough* Google *cough*...
(Weird that, huh?)
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org takes like 10 minutes on my computer. It's not going to win any awards for speed.
If Linux had a better one...
I found it interesting in TFA when OpenOffice was compared to Firefox. Its not Firefox, it Mozilla. What OpenOffice needs to succeed is a decrufting just as Mozilla needed a few visionary programmers to come along and throw it all out.
IMHO, as it stands OO is a slow, crufty, bloated nightmare. For gods sakes, will someone drive a stake into the heart of this ten headed monster and kill it. Maybe a phoenix will rise from the ashes.
OO needs to take a long hard look at the success of Firefox. You don't win by being free, you win by being better. Firefox is better than IE. OO isn't anywhere close to better than Microsoft Office.
I hate the evil empire as much as the next geek, but don't let hate blind you to relative quality.
and? Are we supposed to see your brother as the most important person in the world or something? My brother won't switch to Linux because he doesn't know how to work a command line and we still don't have a decent control panel applet on any Linux distribution worth mentioning. So why isn't that the most important application? When you don't need to operate a shell to configure your computer, then we'll see more defections, not before.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I agree that the OOo guys need to draw a line in the sand soon with 2.0, go gold, if for no othere reason than the current 1.1 is so insainly lacking compared to MS office or OOo2 beta. But just because the number is higher doesnt make it better, want proof, look at Adobe Reader, what can 7 do that 5 can not?
I use Ubuntu, and put up with the various annoying things. Like installing a new app via synaptic and then having no way to launch it except by running it from the command line. That's a new kind of insanity.. the first time it happened to me I actually went and grabbed the source package, extracted it and looked at the diff created by the Ubuntu team to see if I hadn't missed where they put the menu item. Nope, nothing there. So we have this dead simple package installation program but no way for an ordinary user to actually run the programs they've installed. Genius!
How we know is more important than what we know.
I think it can be argued that, for wide-scale adoption of Linux, the first step will be the wide-scale adoption of OpenOffice over the MS office suite.
After that, switching out the underlying OS becomes transparent (Ok, more transparent for more people).
I guess I subscribe to the idea that a key foothold MS has (at least in the corporate world) is that all of our data is stored in their propietary file formats. Or, in other words, the problem in switching people over isn't that they have to run a MS os, they have to run the MS apps, in particular their office suite. Excel and Word are defacto standards to run a business -- and by extension the MS OS.
It's in that sense that I do think OpenOffice is incredibly important to the OSS world at large. The threat of being a credible (or higher quality, more useful) replacement is higher than with what's happened (and happening) with Firefox vs IE, since IE is also free. MS Office is far from free -- and I think it'll be easier to justify abandoning it because of the cash saved.
If I were MS, I do think OpenOffice is the one OSS project I'd be most nervous about, as it's one of the major threats to the monopoly, and an attack on one of the biggest reasons companies are forced to pay for the MS OS.
BTW, the web browser is probably the other "very important app" for the same reasons, and it's cool that Mozilla Firefox has grown so much. At work it doesn't matter that I choose to run Linux, since I'm running the same web browser as many people who are running Windows (my company is already formally supporting, and recommending, Firefox for internal use). Again though, imagine that IE was an extra app that companies had to pay money for -- I wonder what the Firefox adoption rate would be.
One last thing, it's no surprise that MS has from the beginning to "subvert" the web and web standards. It's all about the formats. I guess they simply arrived way too late to the Web to completely take it over. But I'm sure they know that if they had managed to switch everyone over to ms-propietary-html to surf the web, we'd be paying through the nose for IE and their OS and Office monopoly would be further protected.
Can you please explain to this nutjob how I can give my boardroom presentation in vi to maximize visual impact? I really need to get my message through.
Sure, but I'll explain it to you.
1. Draft your document in vi, add some preamble and the requisite \begin{slide} and \end{slide}, etc. where necessary.
2. Compile.
3. Display on screen during the board meeting.
You can make things as simple or as complex as you'd like.
I have fond memories of seeing a few thousand of secretaries using a similar approach. Granted, it was Wordperfect with template macros, and not vi, but they had little problem generating long documents with complex structures and tables after learning some basic markup.
I agree that Open Office is one of the most important open source projects. This is because it won't be a Linux derivitive that makes its way onto the desktops of the masses first. It will be open, free applications that can reliably provide the benifit of expensive commercial applications on the *Windows* desktop. A company I work for is interested in an open source "Save to PDF" tool because, well, have you priced Adobe's Acrobat lately? Not cheap. So, they are willing to consider this open source replacement to distribute to the general population. It provides most of the functionality that most of their user base needs and saves them money. The users don't even need to learn anything new. But ask them to swap out their enterprise desktop? Forget about it. If Open Office can get there (and it will *long* before Linux deriviti do), the Corporate World(TM) will open its loving arms.
Bang Logic - Serious Small Business Services
Let's take these FUD-esque statements one at a time. I've just booted my laptop to Kubuntu so I can walk through this.
Changing the screen resolution.
Right click on the background, select "Configure Desktop", click "Display", select your screen resolution from the drop-down.
Configuring display/mouse/keyboard drivers.
Configuring the display drivers we may have just covered. If you're thinking about editing your xconfig files, I've never had to Kubuntu. It's not like The Old Days anymore.
My keyboard and mouse worked out of the box. I can plugin in a USB mouse at any time and the system picks it up uses it. However, if you want to tweak the keyboard or mouse, click your "System" icon in the task bar, select the "Settings" entry. Select "Peripherals". You'll see both "keyboard" and "mouse" in the dialog. Tweak away.
Configuring a network
From the System/Settings dialog we were just in... clck "Internet and Networking". You can add network interfaces, configure the proxy, set up your wireless networks, configure Samba, etc and so forth.
Installing a printer
Back to the "Peripherals" screen. Click the "Printers" button.
I think you're comment about the menu items is related to the people who wrote the package you've installed, not the people who wrote the operating system.
Kubuntu is drop dead easy to use. You can still open a shell and go crazy (if you know how), but you don't have to anymore.
btw, they just released a new preview of their next version. They claim to have improved the Control Panel (kcontrol). I'm downloading it now to see what they've done.
Agile Artisans
> My brother is a lawyer and would love to move his entire staff over to an open source suite (just for financial reasons) but he has to be 100% compatible.
Then he shouldn't be using Microsoft Office. Different versions of Microsoft Office often render the same file differently. For compatibility, use PDF or OpenDocument. *Everyone* can view and edit his OpenDocument files since *everyone* has a license to install and use the same version of OpenOffice.org while there are far fewer people with a license to install and use the same version of Microsoft Office.
And besides, I, my parents, and my aunt and uncle use OpenOffice.org 2.0 betas. They would probably *never* switch to Microsoft Office, even if you gave them the chance.
Adoption of OpenOffice will be sped by two things - adoption of Linux/*BSD on the server and workstation, and awareness and availability of the cheaper but mostly equivalent option for home users. The reason people at home don't use OpenOffice is because they already have Microsoft Office. The old argument that people expect to have Microsoft Office when they buy the computer is not true, since most computers are sold with Works (completely incompatible with any recent version of Office). All people need is a half decent office suite - the first highstreet retailer to realise that people would prefer OpenOffice to Works will make some money then everyone else will follow suit.
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.
Disclaimer: I'm no MS fanboi. In fact, I dislike a lot of what they do. I'm no OO fanboi. In fact, I'm quite disgusted with what they've done with the product.
7 20
and you'll see that OO is 5-6 yrs behind MSO. I've done my best to use OO and even to try and help. I am so disgusted by the developers and their responses to my pleas for improvement in key areas that I've stopped promoting OO to people that need a cheap office suite. If they need a free one then I still show it off. If they have some $$ then I show them where to get MSO dirt cheap. The new MSO 12 looks to blow the socks off of anything out there. If it all works like it is supposed to (huge IF) it will be a remarkable product.
The delta between Excel and Calc is too large to ignore.
The delta between Powerpoint and Impress is small at the moment and can be tolerated.
The delta between Word and Writer is negligible for _most_ users. For a basic word processor Writer is better but _a lot_ of people I know love the collaboration features of Word. I hate how Word keeps "thinking" for me and screwing with my documents.
The delta between MSO and OO in terms of speed is just a tad smaller than the distance from one end to the other of the Grand Canyon.
Now considering all that, OO is trailing, hugely. Now look at... http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114
In that case, I thank the OO development team for putting pressure on MS. Like everyone, competition causes one to raise their performance and I think MSO 12 will be a killer app. I just wish OO could have moved quicker.
You sound mighty sure of yourself for someone who writes XP software. ;)
/etc/X11/xorg.conf and pray.
Sigh. I also write a lot of Free Software.
Let's take these FUD-esque statements one at a time.
That's offensive. Just because I'm pointing out some obvious deficiencies does not mean I have some evil agenda.
Configuring the display drivers we may have just covered. If you're thinking about editing your xconfig files, I've never had to Kubuntu. It's not like The Old Days anymore.
I'm talking about changing your X display driver from "nv" to "nvidia" so you can play some games. I believe the current procedure is: edit
Back to the "Peripherals" screen. Click the "Printers" button.
Note that lack of support for your printer. Note that complete lack of any information that tells you how to install a third party driver. Ask on the forums and get a long procedure that involves the command line and running vim/emacs a lot.
I think you're comment about the menu items is related to the people who wrote the package you've installed, not the people who wrote the operating system.
Uhhhh, no. It's about the Ubuntu team not adding a menu item to the diff they apply to the Debian package to create the Ubuntu package. It's entirely about the people who made the distro. Not that I'm complaining. If they don't want to add a menu item, fine, but don't be surprised when your average user wonders how the hell they can run the program they just installed.
btw, they just released a new preview of their next version. They claim to have improved the Control Panel (kcontrol). I'm downloading it now to see what they've done.
Yeah, sounds like Kubuntu is pulling ahead of Ubuntu!
How we know is more important than what we know.
From the point of view of business, there are two fundamental applications:
1) Email
2) Wordprocessing/Self publication.
These are the drivers.
Personally, I see three killer apps from Microsoft (or currently owned by Microsoft) that yet to have equivalents in the open-source world:
- Excel:
The power of the Excel in power-user mode is phenominal. The scalability, programability and calculation abilities of this program are amazing. Open Office does not, as yet, scrape the surface. That OO calc is enough for 90% of all users means that it won't get into businesses where the other 10% need to share data.
- Project
- Visio
I'll bundle these two, as neither are particularly complicated, but the file formats have become defacto standard. Once open source tools can import and export these formats, we'll be able to start displacing them on the desktop.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
" Why even have split development? Most ppl who don't use the current OO aren't not using it b/c of some small bugs, but b/c it lacks major abilites like being able to competantly convert MS formats"
What you say? Don't you know that office formats are based on XML and are completely open? Anybody can read and write office formats.
evil is as evil does
If anyone's trying to write open source software that uses MS Word, here's a web service that uses OpenOffice.org to convert to Oasis OpenDocument 1.0 format, and then optionally runs the XML through an XSLT pipeline to make any XML/HTML.
I had about 100 test documents and I tried using Abiword, WVWare, but OpenOffice.org had the best reverse engineering of msword. Is there any other open source conversion software I should have used?
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
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???
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Maybe someone can create a new GUI for OOo that doesn't like that of Office 97. Sad but true, much open source software clings to GUIs of old closed source designs (Nautilus : MacOS 9, Epiphany : Netscape 4, AbiWord : Word 97 etc.). I wonder when open source developers will make GUIs that are innovatively good, rather than creatively bad (Blender, Grip anyone?).
This is the stupidest argument I've ever heard. Allow me to summarise: Linux isn't broken because Windows is broken. How freakin' braindead is that? Face reality, people use Windows. If you want people to use Linux you have to be better than Windows. You can't say "Windows is broken too" like a child, you have to fix the god damn problem.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Jon Udell has an interesting idea of reinventing the office suite for a networked world. He says it should include "service orientation, peer-to-peer capability, workflow, federated identity, and new ways to query and visualize data." With the source code, someone could develop a system that could improve inter-company communication and collaboration using Open Office. We need to think 21st century.
I understand Abiword and Gnumeric can't replace the entire MS suite, but surely word processing and spreadsheet are the most common office suite applications (except maybe email, which OO doesn't have either.) I certainly don't understand why an integrated bloated "Office Suite" like OO is needed to replace MS Office, when Abiword and Gnumeric seem to me to be doing a much better job right now than OO.
We don't necessarily need a single office suite like OO to replace MS Office. Right now I would support Gnumeric and Abiword.
Penny - plain text accounting
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.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Gnumeric was the only spreadsheet in the list, so is the only direct competitor. HOW is Excel more powerful than Gnumeric? I know from personal experience that Gnumeric has more built-in functions & the functions are CORRECT. Excel does have some mistakes, which have persisted for many versions.
The others all allow you to manipulate and chart data, so they aren't ALL that different. They each intend to address specific (and different) limitations of standard spreadsheet software.
R/S/SPSS are for when you need more thorough statistics.
Octave is a decent Matlab clone. Matlab is more costly than Excel, but Octave is GPLed. They are both better general purpose/scientific numerical programming languages (I'd also group python+Numeric+scipy+matplotlib in this group).
Grace/Kaleidagraph/Origin are for better graphing.
Thank you for pointing out the obvious, I've been waiting for someone in the Slashdot community to notice this fact: The next MS Office is at LEAST half a decade more advanced than OpenOffice.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboy by any stretch of the word, and I REALLY cringe when some PR bozo starts spouting words like "innovation" to describe their company's products. Having said that, MS Office 12 is the DEFINITION of innovation. Yes, I just cringed at myself, but it's true. If you watch that video, you simply cannot deny the truth in this.
Linux may be one of the more advanced operating systems in the world, and a bunch of open source software may be the best in their field by leaps and bounds. However, OpenOffice is really going to be in trouble, saved only by the fact that it's "free".
In fact, looking at the differences between Office 12 and OO brings up a very obvious point about open source software: VERY few OSS developers are willing to innovate (with notable exceptions, of course). Look at KDE copying Windows, for example, with a start button and all that crap. You find this in most popular OSS projects, they copy the look, feel, and functionality of commercial products without really doing any innovation (yes, that silly term again). This is the biggest weakness of OSS, by far. They look like clones of existing commercial software (with usually just a handful of improvements). This is a weakness because when a commercial company like Microsoft releases a completely redesigned product like Office 12, the OSS competition is immediately cut off at the knees.
Having said all this, I wish the OO.org development community a lot of luck. They've been busily trying to clone what is essentially the 1997 version of MS Office, and perhaps this will be their wake-up call. I'm sure that one of the next releases, perhaps two or three years from now, will be similar to Office 12. But perhaps, given this sudden jolt of REAL competition from Microsoft, they'll design something even BETTER. And if that happens, we will all benefit.
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
I totally agree. To me, Access is like the swiss army knife of data processing.
.mdb file and you are done.
Have a list to mangle? Shove it in a table or two and run some queries on them.
Want to query to totally unrelated databases that use totally different database servers? Link the tables via ODBC and run queries.
Create a really basic data entry tool? Build a form that feeds a table in literally minutes.
Want to easily move that little form to another computer for someone else to fill in? Just copy that ONE
Plus, if you want to move into something with a real database, well, Access makes a great front end to your full featured database.
I'm not a huge MS fan, but they do have some excellent products. Access, and Exchange/Outlook and SQL Server come to mind.
- Lack of Microsoft Office
- Typically, people don't want to go to the command-line and 'apt-get' or 'make install' or 'emerge' et. al. their software. Most people want to be able to go to website XYZ and download something that shows an icon on their desktop. That icon when 2x clicked will launch an installer and do everything for them in a little user interaction way such as:
- Launch Installer
- Click "Next"
- Click "I agree to the soul sucking license agreement"
- Click "Next" a few more times
- Click "Finished"
- The installer for the Operating System must be as easy as Windows or MacOS X
- Linux/*BSD need to have the following:
- Pre-Configured Systems at retail outlets such as:
- Wal*Mart
- Costco
- BestBuy
- Circuit City
- Fry's
- Sears
- Support from Major software vendors such as:
- Microsoft
- Apple (Quicktime/iTunes)
- Macromedia
- Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat)
- Alias/Wavefront (Maya)
- Quark
- Other Major vendors
- A Call Center
- The user should have a standard command-line available, but should not ever really need to touch it if they don't want to
Between Linux and *BSD, I believe that the very nature of the GPL hinders Linux in becoming a serious desktop OS. By the very nature of the BSD License, BSD is more ideally suited to be supported by major software vendors than is Linux. (This thought is incomplete as I have to leave) I will explain why I believe this on my own website and post the URL here for anyone interested.Sorry all you OpenOffice guys, you have to face facts though, Microsoft Office is THE BUSINESS STANDARD. Just about every major business under the sun uses the Microsoft Office suite, it is installed on all desktop workstations from the Janitor to the CEO.
Once OpenOffice provides all the same functionality as Microsoft Office in a consistant way, offers technical support (excluding forums, because mom & dad want to be able to call someone), and can be purchased, even at a nominal price in places like Costco, then it will become more popular and has a chance on the desktops of corporate America, provided of course that it is 100% compatible with whatever the current version of Microsoft Office is.
Oh and OOo or OpenOffice.org is a stupid name to call the suite, drop the .org and just call it OpenOffice.
and then have a nice little icon in their "Start" menu or on their desktop that they can lauch the application with.
Sorry, The GIMP doesn't cut it
Without a place where users can call and speak to a live person for support, Linux/*BSD will never gain significant marketshare outside of the server room.
1) Open Office needs to reach the good enough mark. I think it is getting very close to that for a lot of people.
The whole tech support thing is a bit of a non issue - I only know of one person who has called Microsoft for tech support - they weren't very impressed. What mums and dads like better than somebody to ring its somebody they can take the computer to and have them fix it. As more IT professionals become familiar with OpenOffice this sort of support will become available.
Although I can't see OpenOffice in costco in the immediate future - I am willing to bet that you will be able to pick up a copy in most newsagents.
partly true - Openoffice needs to be compatible with the features that are frequently used and is likely to be experienced by that user. The Office compatibility thing only really works if you have everybody using the same version of office in the same environment. It might work that way in other parts of the world but it does not work that way in my area. People very quickly learn what they can and can't send to other people. As long as OpenOffice is as good or better than using a different version of office I think that will be good enough.
Open Office was the prefered name. But it turns out that name is intellectual property of somebody else.
2) Have you actually seen a mum and dad user with a windows installer for the first time. They freeze they get through two maybe three of the questions and give up. It is very intimidating. Essentually what should happen is the user should click once agree to the license (if absolutely necessary) and install (two clicks tops) (maybe with an option for advanced users to tweek the settings before install). The best installer I have used on linux is Synaptic. It is excellent for expert users. If somebody could create a polished version of this that would show only the applications that a normal user would be interested in (by default) and let them install them with a single click I think we might be onto a winner, I agree with the comments about the start menu however
3) There are installers that surpass the ease of use of the windows XP installer. Mepis Linux is my favourite. You put the CD in boot from it - You end up with a fully working desktop... There is an Icon on the desktop that says "Install me" You answer a couple of questions (things like language settings and location) Then the whole lot gets copied to your hardrive. The extra complexity comes from the fact that Mepis allows you to install itself along side other operating systems - which is something people generally want to do... To aid in this task it runs a program very simular to partition Magic - A very nice touch
4) a - these will come as the market matures and demand increases - There are things that nead to be done in order to make these systems popular enough for these chain outlets to stock it.
b -
I really like the idea behind LaTeX -- I've used it for about 5 years now (mostly academically), but I've always had problems when it's come to writing my own classes and packages.
I've found LaTeX is fine to a certain point, but I've also found that as soon as it comes to writing any sort of presentation code, the documentation becomes a lot harder to find and usefully comprehend. I've also had a lot of problems figuring out TeX and LaTeX as languages at all.
There seems to be so much potential for conflict between packages, and the whole thing feels quite flakey. Even in standardly-provided classes, I've lost count of the number of times where I've read things like "it's okay to do this, but make sure you don't do it at the same time as that, or you'll have problems". They're numerous things like not being able to use a table recursively, or having a page environment act like a page 90% of the time, but inexplicably break with the other 10%. Maybe it's something like being able to get the width of object A and being able to set the width of cell B, but not being able to insert the result of one into the parameter for the other.
The need to compile something two, three or four times just to make sure references are all up-to-date seems a little unnecesary and overly-complex in today's world. It might help for compiling large documents without much memory, but in today's world it seems a bit awkward when weighing it against the possibility of making a compilation mistake. (Okay, I use a Makefile for my compiles, but I still think it's something the compiler should really be doing itself.)
For anything beyond basic writing (which to be fair is often more than enough), the language is full of exceptions and inconsistencies. I've always found that to be quite frustrating. I'm sure that part or all of it might be because I've missed some fundamental points of the language, but I've not yet been able to identify what they actually are.
I do like the concept behind LaTeX. I realise it's a type-setting language, and that puts certain restrictions on it. It's just that when using it, I've often felt like I'm dealing with a language that was built on some dated 1970's programming concepts and restrictions, and has never seriously improved over all this time. Even though it's probably not as powerful, I find it much more convenient (and enjoyable) to just mark up things I write in some basic HTML, which I'm confident will work much more consistently if I try to do anything non-trivial.
I'll have to side with rolfwind on this one. "Let's mis-label it a release, so people will beta-test it for us" is the kind of idea that really disgusts me.
Now I'm not opposed to smaller incremental releases, meaning less features added, and easier to thoroughly test before release. But nevertheless, I expect "stable" to be just that: stable.
You have to understand that while maybe for you "yay, I contributed a bug report to OOo" or "yay, I dug for a week through kernel sources and made my old ISA SCSI board work" may count as fun, for most people it doesn't. In the real world it's more like "fuck, why doesn't this POS print my document right?" Or I can tell you first hand that at work we're not like "yay, it's so cool that we contributed a bug report", but rather "fuck, I'm opening yet another PMR for this POS software. Someone remind me... why are we using this crap anyway?"
What's attractive about OSS to most people is the "because lots of other people have inspected the code and made it better for you" part. It's not the "because you too can spend weeks debugging our code and fixing our bugs, or just beta-testing our unstable stuff and waiting for months for a fix" part. Forcing people to be beta-testers against their will, isn't really going to make your software popular.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Sounds like what a lot of people around here criticize Microsoft for."
Well, no. Actually MS does have a policy of not shipping with known deffects. (I.e., literally, they won't release until there's no bug report left.)
Now I won't argue whether their software is higher or lower quality than OOo (that's another flame for another time), but just saying that the "hey, let's mis-label betas as releases so unsuspecting people will beta-test them for us" idea is really sinking even lower than MS ever did. MS's QA and testing might be a lot less than perfect, but, you know, they at least _exist_.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.