Interview With Gary Edwards of OpenOffice.org

silentbob4 writes "Hot on the heels of yesterdays interview of Sun's Florian Reuter posted on Slashdot comes a two page interview with OpenOffice.org's Gary Edwards. In this installment, Gary discusses the importance of open document formats and hints to the release date of OpenOffice.org 2.0: 'No one knows for certain when OpenOffice.org 2.0 stable will be released, but Mad Penguin's bet is that the stable 2.0 release will come before any recently purchased cartons of milk expire in your refrigerator.'"

Comments

The GUI architecture.

[CyricZ]

What is the GUI architecture of the 2.x series like? Are they still using their own home-brewed GUI toolkit, or have they transitioned it to be a wrapper around Qt, GTK+, Win32, etc.?

making OOo not suck

[bcrowell]

It's great to have open document formats, but is there progress in making OOo not suck?

I hear that gcj is now far enough along that it's possible to build OOo without using Sun's not-free-as-in-speech implementation of Java. Have any slashdotters tried it? Does it improve OOo's performance at all, since gcj can compile to native code, or does it not matter that much, since only some parts of OOo are in Java? Will there ever be a day when apt-get on Debian causes a binary compiled with gcj to be installed? Will there ever be a day when you can install OOo on FreeBSD via the ports system (from source) without going through a ridiculous amount of pain (installing Java, which is ridiculously hard because of licensing, and then compiling OOo, which is also always an exercise in frustration)?

OOo 1.x was unacceptably slow for me, even on fairly fast machines. Is there going to be any progress on this front? CPUs aren't improving as quickly any more, and hard disks' performance increases are always at a lower rate than CPU and memory. In general, I see the power-hungriness of software increasing starting to greatly outpace the power of the hardware, especially on non-Linux platforms.

As long as I'm flaming OOo, what about documentation? I recently started digging around for documentation for the OOo spreadsheet, and although there were a whole bunch of docs that were available free online, none of them were comprehensive. (E.g., if you want to fit a line to some data points in OOo, there doesn't seem to be any official documentation anywhere on how to do it. You have to use linest(), and googling on that turned up some third-party docs on university web sites and e-mail lists, none of which had complete, correct info.)