OpenOffice Illustrates Open Source's Limitations?

Cardbox writes "In his latest article in The Guardian, Andrew Brown asks 'If this suite's a success, why is it so buggy?'. OpenOffice, he says, shows the limitations of the open source development model. Brown is not your usual ignorant Microsoft-bribed hack. He has himself contributed macros for OpenOffice users. Brown lists the problems and assigns causes. He adds: 'If OpenOffice3.1 becomes a blockbuster... it will be because large companies such as Sun, Google, and IBM have decided that open source is the cheapest way to gang up on Microsoft, because it means they need spend nothing on support.'"

Comments

OO.o isn't buggy for me

[From A Far Away Land]

I've not used it every day, but I've not had any trouble with OO.o. I've disabled the Java in the Tools Options too, and it starts quicker than before, but it's not crashed on me once. I recommend it to all of my friends when they moan about the price of MS Office.

Early versions of MS Office

[witchman]

I remember how absolutely buggy the first several versions of office was, especially compared to Word Perfect. However, tons of people used it because it was free, "it sucks but it's free." (actual quote)

I'm in charge of rolling out new Window's systems to Dr.'s offices and I've introduced them all to OpenOffice and they all love it. All they really want to do is to be able to compose letters and such and they love that they don't have to pay the expensive fee for having that on everyone's PC.

I think that OpenOffice is a sucess and that it will, in time, continue to get much better.

Word Count!

[taj]

>>
  I have written numerous macros (which automate less obvious, or screamingly obvious, tasks), including the word count for version 1.

Not to detract from his points - bringing more focus can't hurt in the long run - but around 1.2 days I surfed the bug database and found an amazing number of bugs relating to ... word counts.

I wondered what was up with that. I was more concerned about printer bugs and other bugs. Rather funny to see him raise that flag though.

Re:And what about Linux?

[WindBourne]

Actually, I would argue that the BSD's are the more bug-screened OSS projects out there. And they are relatively bug free.

The difference is that Linux is undergoing massive development compared to the BSDs which are making more incremental changes. But most of the Linux eyes are on new code, not on stabilizing current code.

not a good example

[Rutulian]

He makes some good points, but he is kind of picking on OpenOffice which, though popular, is hardly the poster-child of Open Source. The code was a mess long before it became open source. It took a lot of work to get it to even compile after it was open sourced. It uses it's own set of widgets, storage database, and even build system (i.e: it doesn't follow the code reuse principles of most of the successful open source projects). It takes a long time to get up to speed with the code before you can even hope to do anything with it. All of those, I would say, contribute to the reasons why OpenOffice is not "supported by the community." But there are quite a few large and very successful open source projects that do work on the principles the author was trying to refute. Mozilla, Gnome/KDE, Inkscape, Gnumeric, Abiword, Linux, GCC, XOrg, Apache.... So I wouldn't walk around saying the open source model has failed just yet.

File under FUD

[slymole]

Brown is obviously far from unbiased; he seems to base much of his points on a ZDnet blog post by George Ou and bashes its' detractors, while it's patently obvious that Ou's "performance comparison" is a shoddy and misleading piece of work (for instance, witness this comment thread).

OpenSource alternative?

[msbsod]

How about KOffice as alternative? Is there any comparison between OpenOffice and KOffice published? When I looked into the OpenOffice code a while ago I was discouraged by the original StarOffice code and the amount of Java code. I guess Sun added the Java code, thanks, but no thanks. As far as I can tell there is at least no Java dependence in KOffice. It would be nice to compare two comparable OpenSource projects directly instead of making general statements based on just one example.

Re:Alternate -- only 2 bugs mentioned

[matthew5]

Disclaimer: I use OpenOffice daily. I use Writer, Calc, Base and on occasion Impress.

I have found a few bugs/missing features I would like to have. For example:

-in Impress, so far there is no way to embed sound or other multimedia files. In PowerPoint I used to do this. I would like to be able to have a music file play while the slides autoadvance. I can do the second part easily, but I can't get sound to play. I also have not yet been able to embed a short film clip on a slide.

-in Writer/Calc/Base there is no easy way to print mailing labels from either a spreadsheet or database mailing list. The help files give a method to do it, but when the method is followed only the first page is formatted making it necessary to repeat the process several times if multipale pages of labels are needed, such as for a large database.

-Impress tends to crash often for me during formatting/creation when my slides have a lot of photos (like if I want to make a slideshow of jpgs/pngs/etc.)

There might be more, those are off of the top of my head less than two minutes after reading the OP and link.

Disclaimer #2: I use Linux exclusively (Ubuntu) because I want to--not because I hate any particular OS or company. I have other very effective methods of producing the mailing labels I need, but I would like a good presentation program...Impress is almost there.

Re:Alternate

[nmb3000]

When I teach a section in my ethics classes about Free Software, my students (virtually all of whom use windows) are astonished when I tell them that my computers (1 GNU/Linux laptop, 1 FreeBSD desktop) only get rebooted when I update the kernel. They are convinced that rebooting every few days is necessary for, e.g., memory management.

Now, I might have it a little unfair. I'm competent enough when it comes to Windows that unless I do something dumb to screw it up, (details we can leave out) I rarely have to reboot. Well, hum, let's see:

C:\>uptime
\\Q has been up for: 23 day(s), 23 hour(s), 23 minute(s), 42 second(s)

Now, ignoring those eerie numbers, my XP Pro SP2 system has been up for almost 24 days and this isn't a record by any stretch. My work PC has been up for several months before. It was only rebooted because an annoying cow-worker remotely rebooted it when I gloated about my uptime. Our department's servers have been up even longer before.

I guess I'm just on some magical island because I hear all these horror stories and yet I rarely face any serious problems that are not user related. When that's the case they are nearly always hardware related. I don't think Windows XP has ever simply gone *bork* out of the blue and stopped working.

So it looks like I'm special, just like my mom always told me.

Re:It's because OO Isn't an Open Source Project

[Bruce Perens]

I'm more familiar with Evolution. I'd call it an open source project, even though it was developed almost exclusively by Ximian/Novell employees. Is it not?

Evolution and Nautilus had the heavy lifting done by Ximian and Eazel, but both projects were carried out as subsystems of the larger GNOME project, rather than as stand-alone Open Source projects. My impression was that the larger GNOME community was involved, if not actively collaborating, that the intent was always to have the GNOME team accept those tools - and that the companies would thus have to meet GNOME's quality standards. The tools did have to go through GNOME's quality processes eventually, including, I remember, some usability work led by Sun.

I don't know much first-hand about how Eclipse went on, but wasn't there a consortium with a lot of companies as members? I'd assume initially not Sun, since blocking the sun is what eclipses are for, but I remember that Sun did eventually get involved.

Bruce

Re:Alternate -- only 2 bugs mentioned

[dorkygeek]

-in Impress, so far there is no way to embed sound or other multimedia files. In PowerPoint I used to do this. I would like to be able to have a music file play while the slides autoadvance. I can do the second part easily, but I can't get sound to play. I also have not yet been able to embed a short film clip on a slide.

Insert -> Movie and Sound.

Quite easy, isn't it? If the format is unknown, then do the following (from the OOo help system): "On UNIX systems, the Media Player requires the Java Media Framework API (JMF). Download and install the JMF files, and add the path to the installed jmf.jar to the class path in Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - Java."

HTH!

Re:It's because OO Isn't an Open Source Project

[Korgan]

On the other hand, Eclipse is predominantly developed by IBM and, as far as I know, doesn't have the restrictions that you spoke of in OOo. I don't really know that much about Eclipse, but it seems to be fairly successful despite the fact that there aren't a huge number of other companies developing it along with IBM. Would it still be classified as an open source project?

Sorry, but IBM only started out as the primary developer. The Eclipse Foundation is now substantially more than just IBM. There are a lot of other very big players involved with Eclipse including CA, Intel, BEA, Borland, Sybase, Zend among others.

Saying Eclipse is dominated by IBM is like saying Linux development is dominated by Redhat. Sure, they're big players when it comes to contributions, but they don't make up the majority on their own.

Re:Alternate

[inflex]

Oh Great, I just found an 'all in one' installer for Lyx

http://developer.berlios.de/projects/lyxwininstall

OpenOffice isn't exactly open source.

[Spy der Mann]

It's a "commercial product gone open".

For an Open Source product to have thriving success, it needs to be BORN open. Take firefox, for example. Even when Netscape opened its source, it had to be rewritten from scratch to fix most of the rendering bugs (massively nested tables, anyone?).

In other words, a definition I would like of Open Source Software is that it's created bottom-up. The author plants a then other people come and make it grow.

Having ONLY ONE AUTHOR would be the same as a closed-source product. What use is having the sourcecode available if nobody reads and modifies it?

Also, the program must be well-designed by its original author. Writing a program with a buggy and limited infrastructure will need to be refactored sooner or later. Multi-tier design (even in non-database apps) is a requisite.

So, if one open source program isn't designed to be configurable (hardwired values, non-unicode strings in wxWidgets), extensible (no support for modularization), it will be very difficult to overcome its limitations.

The Open Source isn't a panacea. It's a field where programs evolve (like genetic algorithms). Good programs survive, bad programs get often forgotten.

But Open Source itself does NOT guarantee a program to be bug-free. It just facilitates the conditions so the bugs can be fixed soon.

So if OpenOffice has serious bugs, don't blame the Open Source model. And yes, I don't like OpenOffice very much, as a longtime MS user, I find some of the interfaces kinda "alien" (but I manage to survive without MS Office installed, and that's a very good thing), and to my frustration i had tried OpenOffice when it still was version 1 (about 5 years ago). eew. >_<