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Google Hiring Programmers to Work on OpenOffice
massysett writes "Google is hiring programmers to work on OpenOffice.org. "We use a fair amount of open-source software at Google. We want to make sure that's a healthy community. And we want to make sure open source preserves competitiveness within the industry," said Google's manager for open-source software. Perhaps Google's work will address an oft-heard complaint about OO.o: "Google believes it can help OpenOffice--perhaps working to pare down the software's memory requirements or its mammoth 80MB download size.""
I mean, yeah, I wouldn't fancy downloading 80 MB over a dial-up connection. But this IS an entire office suite we're talking about.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
> I like Evolution but would like to see a cross-platform PIM
> in the suite as an alternative.
Tor Lillqvist was hired by Novell to help get Evolution running on Windows. While I was working on Revolution and was subscribed to evolution-hackers I remember that he'd occasionally post progress notes there.
I'm not sure how far that effort is along at this point, although Tor certainly seemed to be making excellent progress and was patching all sorts of Gnome/Win32 bugs in various projects.
The Army reading list
That was a competition and this is hiring someone.
Besides what is wrong with rewarding people who most likely would have done that work regardless of the monetary reward? It just enables students like myself to work our crap job/internship less and work on what we love more.
And at least here in New Hampshire, $9.30 an hour is enough for a student job. I made $15 welding in a sheet metal shop but most of my friends were doing worse work at $8 an hour, all before taxes.
Their pay seems decent for students, their target for the competition.
Yah, 80MB isn't that bad. What is bad, though, is how much memory OpenOffice takes up, and how slow it is to load. I hope they make those issues a priority.
Of course, if history teaches us anything, their programmers will spend a year looking through the code, decide it's impossible to deal with, and start from scratch. We should expect Moz^H^H^HGoogle Office to be ready for prime time in about 5 years.
Deer park firefox (1.5) includes incremental patching instead of re-downloading the entire application again. For openoffice: wait, search for an improvement request report, or get working.
The amount of memory open office uses, yeah memory... :)
Oh thats right a hundred other people already made that
comment, must be open office hogging all my memory again,
damn you open-office damn yooooou!
Arash
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
You've got to be kidding me.
I work in the software industry, and every product ships with bugs. That's just how it works. Most companies put a severity level on bugs. Severity 1: ship blocker. Severity 2: really should fix it. Severity 3: we *might* get around to it.
The bug databases don't necessarily contain just bugs - there can be feature enhancements, documentation errors, etc.
Looking through the link you posted, I see 5603 defects in the "new", "started" or "reopened" categories. Of those, 7 are "P1" (aka Severity 1) defects, 144 are "P2", 4083 are "P3", 1160 are "P4", and 209 are "P5".
I didn't look at exact specifics, but some are probably localization errors - not functionality bugs.
Please learn a little more about the software development life cycle before making a comment like yours. Educating your employer about this would probably be a wonderful idea also.
So, for the bugs that would stop you from getting your job done, I see 151. It looks like it's time for you to evaluate OOo in your organization.
So, the Word Processor component is only ~5MB.
Yet OOo is:
Word Processor
SpreadSheet
Presentation
Drawing App
Math App
Database App w/Database
Using the same 5MB per calculation, I get 30MB (6x5MB). Now add in a boatload more features, all with cool icons, plus some snazzy templates and clipart, and you can get it up there in no time flat.
Which isn't to say that there isn't still bloat in OOo. But it's not so significant that it should matter.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The logic in that post is flawed:
1. The math used in the link assumes 40/h weeks for an entire summer? Google paid for the project, NOT for the hours. I could have just as easily worked 5 hours on a project and make several hundred dollars per hour.
2. It was more like a grant, or even a contract. There was no requirement that the participant work X hours, or a particular timeframe. Google paid for the project, not for the hours worked on it.
3. Google Summer of Code != (does not equal for the layman) Current Plans to work on OO.o.
4. Your original argument stated below minimum wage, which last time I checked, was WELL below $9.30/h.
What about other projects? Should we boycott Linux because thousands of Linux developers have been underpaid, or even gasp, not paid at all for contributions they've made to the kernel? Maybe you should think about boycotting Slashdot, the infrastructure is supported by open source applications written by developers who were either paid very low, or not paid at all.
So again, I ask, what do you have to actually back up the statement that Google is going to underpay Indians and Chinese people to work on OO.o?
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
To be recoded in C/C++.
OOo is coded in C++, for the most part. A few plugins use Java. I don't know about 2.0, but 1.1 was perfectly usable without a JRE installed.
Office 2003 Pro is nearly 6 times as large, 477 meg according to the install point we have at work.
As pointed out many times, turn off Java in the OOo options. It will start a *lot* faster.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
I believe parts of Base (the DB in OO.o 2) is partially written in Java, but since I only use Writer and Calc, I was happy to save ~20MB RAM and ~10 seconds off the load time.
... And so it comes to this.
Apple's customers are like no others -- a rich blend of the most sociologically elite with those seeking elegant, simple computing. ... Unlike users of Intel/Windows computers, a significant portion of Apple's users are active, exploratory, avant-garde and early adopters. The activities they enjoy are unique in the the way that they more often incorporate rich media such as video and music as well as more active prosumer behavior than many more passive Windows users.
With above-average household income and education levels, the Mac population [is] very attractive [intellectually as well as physically.]
I must plead ignorance regarding MS Office file sharing features. Every office I've worked in has used Windows (or at least SMB) file servers to share files. I have yet to see any MS Office program share a document. What constitutes "file sharing features"?
... And so it comes to this.
In OOo's case, the application *must* be bundled together. They're all part of the same codebase, and are pretty much inseperable without throwing away and rewriting the whole thing. I would be interested in knowing how much "just the core" takes, but I'm guessing it's far more than you'd expect. (Say ~20MB.)
We can pretty much thank StarDivision for their "StarDesk" idea for this rediculous level of integration. Sadly, we're still paying for it 5 years later.
As somebody else pointed out the last time OO.o was discussed on Slashdot, bundling all those applications together was more of a marketing innovation on Microsoft's part than a technical innovation.
That was very much true, at least in the beginning. However, I believe that Microsoft now shares significant amounts of code between the applications, making it just as much technological as marketing. Microsoft can still separate out the applications, but they have to send a huge core of software with each one. (Which doesn't bother Microsoft since it all gets "integrated" with Windows.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I just tested this 5 times with the option on and with the option off. It averaged 10 vs 8 seconds. Twenty percent improvement is nothing to sneeze at generally, but 2 seconds just doesn't give a huge improvement feel.
Unattractive squares should stick to Linux and Windows. Skinny chic is for different thinkers.
.... and your Windows machine has 64 MB of RAM, whereas your SuSE machine has 2 gigs?
But seriously, your example means nothing without some system specs.
I'm on Ubuntu. The packages are thus:
4 .deb4 .deb4 .deb4 .deb6 4.deb. deb. debm d64.debb . deb4 .debd 64.deb
tricky@maihem:/var/cache/apt/archives$ ls -l *ffice*.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 29138 2005-10-22 09:47 openoffice.org2_2.0.0-0ubuntu1-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2813238 2005-10-22 09:48 openoffice.org2-base_2.0.0-0ubuntu1-0ubuntu1_amd6
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3579878 2005-10-22 09:48 openoffice.org2-calc_2.0.0-0ubuntu1-0ubuntu1_amd6
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 22900216 2005-10-22 05:35 openoffice.org2-common_2.0.0-0ubuntu1_all.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31410644 2005-10-22 09:48 openoffice.org2-core_2.0.0-0ubuntu1-0ubuntu1_amd6
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1780530 2005-10-22 09:48 openoffice.org2-draw_2.0.0-0ubuntu1-0ubuntu1_amd6
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 211060 2005-10-22 09:48 openoffice.org2-gnome_2.0.0-0ubuntu1-0ubuntu1_amd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10917468 2005-10-07 23:20 openoffice.org2-help-en-gb_1.9.129-0.1ubuntu5_all
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10917518 2005-10-22 15:34 openoffice.org2-help-en-gb_2.0.0-0ubuntu1_all.deb
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 10941694 2005-10-07 23:20 openoffice.org2-help-en-us_1.9.129-0.1ubuntu5_all
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 556844 2005-10-22 09:48 openoffice.org2-impress_2.0.0-0ubuntu1-0ubuntu1_a
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2301594 2005-10-22 05:35 openoffice.org2-java-common_2.0.0-0ubuntu1_all.de
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2541646 2005-10-02 19:00 openoffice.org2-l10n-en-gb_1.9.129-0.1ubuntu3_all
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2548458 2005-10-22 06:02 openoffice.org2-l10n-en-gb_2.0.0-0ubuntu1_all.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 593056 2005-10-22 05:35 openoffice.org2-l10n-en-us_2.0.0-0ubuntu1_all.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 309896 2005-10-22 09:48 openoffice.org2-math_2.0.0-0ubuntu1-0ubuntu1_amd6
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4762282 2005-10-22 09:48 openoffice.org2-writer_2.0.0-0ubuntu1-0ubuntu1_am
That's (approx):
core - 31.3M
common - 22.5M
writer - 4.6M
calc - 3.4M
impress - 5.3M
and other miscellaneous
I'd say about 67M is shared, help, and localisation.
I've been working for Sun for the past 6 years. Therefore, I've been using StarOffice. It's what I know, it's what I'm used to.
Actually, most of that time I've been using OOo - no significant difference.
Now I have to use MS Office and MS Outlook. I took a simple 1-page Word document, removed the details from it, and emailed it to somebody saying "This is the format you need to use to make this request".
That seemed pretty straightforward - give him the blank version of the document.
Now, whenever he emails me an updated version of that document, something (Windows? Outlook? Word?) offers to merge his changes back into the original document. I tested it, and even if I remove the original document, it still offers to do the impossible.
I suspect that these are the collaboration features referred to. Personally, I'm capable enough to manage my own documents to live without such a feature. I can see the potential benefit if we were working on a shared document, but that's pretty rare in my experience. The use of macros to force me to view change-control on documents is a real PITA, the fact that something (who knows what?) makes changes to normal.dot every time I load Word, so I get a prompt to save changes (what changes? No idea - just a Yes/No dialog) whenever I close Word, it's half-written software. Ugh. Give me OpenOffice.org any day.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
The biggest file is -core's
[0] Excluding the help, which is not currently built since it requires non-free Java. The installed size of the en_GB help from OpenOffice.org 1.1 is about 20 MB.
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=2786
According to this, its quite usable in Wine.
If you don't need the java features, you can turn off java in the options. That makes for a significantly faster loading. See http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/27/142523 2&from=rss (search for "disable") for a bit more.
You mean like open-sourcing their Darwin base OS code? Or contributing their improvements to GCC to the world? Or providing the world with a free open source streaming server system? Or making Zeroconf an open standard and releasing a free reference implementation? Or contributing improvements to CUPS? Or to KDE's HTML renderer? Or releasing their unified replacement for cron, init and rc as an open source project?
Right now you are making a fool of yourself in public. Either that or you're trolling.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
No both are the same system. Not everyone has room for more than one computer. On that note it is an Athlon XP 2800 with 512MB RAM
Karma? Hey I just call it as I see it.