Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
We always see comments bashing MS and praising Open source. Its good to see some fair comments on the other side too..
StarOffice was purely commercial for a long time, until Sun bought them and opened the code. I don't know how much of that has since been replaced, or even how much of a difference this makes, but it isn't unreasonable to consider this.
Linux my friend is also Open Source, but is probably one of the most bug-screened OSS projects out there. It is far from bugged-out.
How many bugs does Microsoft Office have? Or, more to the point from Joe User's POV, how many irritating behaviors does it have, whether they're technically "bugs" or not? More than OpenOffice? Fewer? About the same?
All I know is, MS Office is almost physically painful to use for anything more complex than the simplest tasks. If OpenOffice can beat this "standard," it's doing well.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
OOo's got bloat up the yingyang.. You'd think the 2.0 release would not be as bloated.
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
If you are using OpenOffice the only sample survey of "open source," then sure, his conclusion may hold. But he ignores all other open source projects which are much larger than OpenOffice. He takes OO and then extrapolates from that the entire open source development model is flawed. Why not look at Linux, gnome, kde, or any other massive open source projects which do not receive the majority of their funding/source code from companies?
No kidding, what a flamebait article too. I could only find reference to two actual bugs in the article: notes (or comments, as Word users call them) don't have word wrap; and spaces typed at the end of a line won't show.
The rest is some rant about OS people saying users can submit bug patches but hardly anybody does.
If Windows is such a success, why is it so buggy?
Maybe because it's not so buggy? Whilst nothing will be bug free it's kinda moronic to see the same bullshit modded +5 funny day in day out along with the BSOD jokes in 2005 and clippy jokes. They really aren't funny to the majority of people who will find the current MS OS stuff to be pretty stable assuming their not stupid enough to open freesex.exe and whatever else. Cue for someone to tell me their stories about spontaneously combusing registries that always seem to happen to MS haters.
Free and Open-Source software does not represent anti-corporate software. Richard Stallman doesn't think so, as he encourages people to make money off of free software by selling it. Furthermore, the phrase Open-Source came about at least partly as a way to appeal more widely to business people in Silicon Valley. That is, "OSS" has its roots in the corporate environment.
The claim, that "the success of any FS/OSS product will be due to large companies deciding its the best strategy for getting a high quality product without having to be at the mercy of a single proprietar" only helps to promote the idea of Free Software. I don't think anybody denies that business know how to make a good product.
Free Software and Open Source Software is not anti-coroporate and it is certainly not anti-government ( e.g., the GPL relies completely on the fact that the US government will protect and defent copyright laws) --- and I'm not sure where these misconceptions came from.
I think all of us in the community thank companies like IBM for patching the kernel, for supporting Free Software. I think we are grateful that Google encourages their employees to spend 20% of their time on Free Software projects. And, I think we will only be all the more thankful when even larger companies, like the US Government starts funding them as well. And why will they continue to fund them? Because philosophically and economically it is the right move.
I think it's interesting that aside from the complaint that OOo is slow and bloated (possibly from being a Windows/UNIX hybrid), the only two complaints are:
1) no word wrap in comment boxes
2) spaces don't show up at the end of a line
Number 2 I see often in word processors in order to perform word wrap properly, so I'm not sure what he's talking about. Number 1 seems minor in comparison to the enormous bugs in Office on things as simple as page numbering and wrapping text around a picture.
Also, he doesn't consider that the restrictions on OOo code may be keeping some programmers away since they have to sign everything over to Sun.
Also, to be fair, an office suite is a giant, unweildy, unUNIXy type of program. Digging through the monsterous codebase is a high barrier to fixing a bug that may just be a minor annoyance. An office suite would have to be broken into much smaller parts in order to encourage more people to develop the software.
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
Openoffice is so wierd and often buggy precisely because it follows the closed source mentality. A huge amount of insane staroffice code was realeased by Sun. It had been internally developed. It had/has wierd custom build mechanisms. It misuses integers as pointers (hence making it non-amd64 safe). It didn't use common printing mechanisms like cups. It used/uses its own very strange widget set. It used/uses its own font handling mechanisms. It used/uses its own spellchecking system. It's practically a desktop in itself.
It's wierd because it spent the first 90% of its life as a closed app. And it shows. Remeber when netscape released their code and the open source world had to basically start from scratch writing gecko because the code was so (dare I say it?) awful? Well OO.o is a project that is several times the size only they haven't had the opportunity to do a rewrite. On top of that it's mainly written by three (traditionally closed development) companies who are trying to pull it in slightly different directions (Sun, IBM & Novell).
Contrast with open-from-the-start projects such as koffice, abiword and gnumeric, which are generally accepted as being much better behaved, even though they might not have all of the features.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
I think some of this has historicaly been a trust problemn, and some has been their copyright assignment policy (which is also a trust problem).
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
What you call "open source" programs are just some loosely assembled code lines stolen from companies that make real software.
:)
:)). Some would say: Software libre takes more than a license, it takes a design.
Real software? You mean, like Real Player? No loosely assembled code lines for sure.
Do you think a bunch of hippies would do something useful, apart smoking their pot.
At least I'm doing something useful right now! Thanks for the support, I'll keep up the good wo.. err.. smokin'
No, they write software that is outmoded since 1983, and call thelm "free".
Mhh, there's a misunderstanding here sir. Open source may be what you describe, but free (as in speech) software isn't at all. It isn't about code, it's about the software liberty, and in my experience, the code is often better than proprietary code (which nobody sees so there's nothing to be ashamed of, maybe FOSS haters are just jalous that some people can actually produce code that can be shown?
...that Microsoft Office has a nestful of bugs on its own. I've had MS Office 2000 crash on me, I've dealt with memory leaks in 97, 2000 and v.X for OSX, and there are things that are easy to do in OpenOffice.Org that are maddeningly opaque in MS Office. For example: how do you do the kind of hanging-indentation thing that APA style requires for Bibliography lists? I have tried to do it in Office and it is not obvious how to do it at all. However, it's a breeze in OpenOffice.Org.
.DOC. Fixed. You might have to retweak some formatting, but you've cleansed the file.
It's also dead easy to take multiple OO Impress presentations and splice them together into one big presentation. However, try doing it in Office. Again, how to do that is not obvious at all, and it should be.
There's also something I brought up in another thread here: Open Office will fix corrupted and virus-laden Office documents. Just save in Open Office native format, then resave the OO.O native file as
OO.O rocks. I want to see a version that will natively run under OS X, but as long as iWork exists, Apple's not going to encourage it. OK, no problem, I'll run it happily under Linux.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
to be pure invective, and an obvious attempt to score points with the OSS crowd. There are grounds to criticize software in both the OSS and Microsoft camps, but impugning the motives of those who raise the criticism weakens the argument... at least IMO.
Sigs cause cancer.
openoffice has it's share of problems, but this article is pretty crap, tbh. he goes on about it being really buggy, and then the best two bugs he can find are that spaces don't show at the end of lines (!?), and notes don't wrap. were these the best two he could come up with?!
ok, OO isn't on a par with MS Office for functionality- but then as many have pointed out, the average person doesn't need the extra stuff that MS Office does. and the article didn't mention that ms office has it's quirks too; i can never get it to format tables the way I want to, and trying to get a document to look the same in different versions of Word is a non-starter unless it's extremely basic.
i've been using both programs for years now, and OO is far from perfect - but i prefer it to ms office because it's easier to do the everyday things. it's just as stable in everyday use, i can use it anywhere, the UI doesn't change too much across versions, the formats don't change across versions, I don't have to pay to upgrade... i could go on. yes, it's slower - but we're talking fractions of a second for most operations, for god's sake. is it bigger? does anyone care these days, when hard drives are measured in the 100s of Gb? OO's saved documents tend to be smaller, in my experience - which is more important. i'm sure most people would be better off with ms office, but would they be [insert retail price here] better off? i doubt it.
in any case, the article spends 90% of it's words slating OO, then at the end the guy says he still thinks it's better for writing books. eh? he criticizes OO for having no support desk - is he serious!? how many MS Office users ring MS Support desk when they can't write in blue text? seriously. the article is full of this stuff - it's about as balanced as a one-legged trapeze artist.
OO has a way to go yet, but labelling it 'dire', and a complete failure, because it isn't as good (yet) as the dominant product in the sector, (which has had a monopoly for the best part of 10 years, and until recently was pretty buggy and resource hungry itself), is incredible. if it's so 'dire', why does he still use it himself?
Maybe because it's not so buggy?
Ermmm... correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Windows' success based on Window 95/98, which were both buggy POS's (except for 98SE)? The GP poster has a point when you consider Microsoft built up an monopoly on the basis of a bug-ridden often-unstable OS.
(Posted from a Win2000 system with an uptime in the months - I accept you have a point, but Windows' success came *before* the stability of the 2000/XP editions).
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
The kernel is probably the single best example of open source software working. It's also sexy as hell to work on and relatively small, thus clearing two of the major barriers to getting people to work on it.
A project like OO is huge, and a lot of the work that really needs to be done is boring as hell, not visible, completely unsexy and thankless. Doing maintenance work or squashing a bug that nobody will ever thank you for is just not going to attract developers. So the bugs remain while the features march on, and all the while the product becomes more and more bloated and unusable.
You can see the same pattern elsewhere - look at Kdevelop. Great, great development environment. Infested with piddly little bugs. Small stuff, like it won't save settings reliably, or it crashes with XIM, or whatever - but the environment has every feature you could ask for, and more are on the way!
Is that a condemnation of OSS? Nope, but it's something that the community has got to deal with - as the article points out - and probably sooner rather than later. How that happens, I do not know, because even in companies that are paying people to write code, it's rare to find someone who actually wants to get in there and do the grunt work when there are sexy new features to work on.
Was it a doc file? Did he do it without opening the app first? Was MS Office preloader enabled?
No, OOo loads spreadsheet files fully into RAM while Excel only loads the part which is currently being worked on. The result for extremely large spreadsheets is that OOo is slower than Excel.
This is a pretty good example of how the FUD and astroturfers work. You analyse the competition for an area where your own product has a theoretical advantage, then just refer constantly to the competitor's flaw as though it was a showstopper instead of just a mild inconvenience.
The intent is to hijack discussions like Slashdot and prevent real comparisons which might show your product in a bad light. Even though most posters debunk the claims you've made, they're defending and discussing a flaw in their product, not yours. Eventually the FUD becomes groupthink, and you can't even mention OOo without some shill chipping in with an "Open Source office software is slow" comment.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I use open office. Been using it for 3 years. It still doesn't work as good as MS office. There are quirky things with it.
The spell checker essentially receives a D+. After I'm done writing a few dozen page paper, I have to paste it into MS office for because Open Office misses too much.
Firfox, for example, is receiving great press because it is a great product. It covers all the simple things. Open office is ok for the basic. MS Office is great for the basics. I'm not reviewing the advanced features here: The face of the product is what the majority of users review.
I still support Open Office though. And I will still use it. But I'm not going to say it is better than MS office. It comes close, but still has to simplify and reduce.
Also, the author of the article is way off the mark to flaw the open source movement as a whole just because of Open Office's shortcomings.
The Custom Mary
I don't entirely agree - but that hardly applies to Linux. Try come up with another example, I'm sure there is one out there.
By your reckoning, java should be much better than C# since it is, well, older, and more mature. It is easier to play catch up (C#) than it is to lead the way. In many aspects the latest release of Java was playing catch up with C#, which has surpassed java in many ways in terms of featureset (java finally gets generics etc.). I don't think there is a better comparison, because it's between the same companies but the situation is pretty much reversed, except microsoft actually had to pay all the developers of office & C# where open office has people hacking away on it for free (and is free to use). Now I'm not saying that OO isn't good enough for most purposes, but microsofts office suite clearly has a leg up on it and I believe the next iteration will only widen that gap. I also feel MS has rather underhanded business tactics but I recognize that is just the nature of the corporation. Don't think Redhat or Sun would do anything more honourable if they were in the same position. You can bet your beans they'd try to lock in their market if they were in the position to.
"Netscape turned into crap as they piled features on it to try to make it complete with Microsoft IE and MS's millions of dollars dumped into it's developement."
And Open Office is crap because, basically, Office Suites suck, and they are just following the trends.
OOWriter is a slow clone of Word. Word sucks: unpredictable pagination across sessions/computers/platforms/printouts(!), primitive typesetting, asinine default settings.
At least OOWRiter can make PDFs and has acceptable default settings.
What would really make a splash is an open-source approach to word processing (or the whole office suite idea) that is better than the ugly, intrusive, slow, WYSIWYG implementation that Microsoft offers.
This isn't a polemic for LaTeX, but for a new kind of word processor, even office suite. Once you show people why Word sucks from a user experience perspective (and not just an idealist, technical, political, or economic, perspective), many will switch.
We need a wordprocesser that encourages semantic layout. I'm talking about templates that are easy to use, not hidden, with accessible formatting controls (think WordPerfect reveal codes).
Maybe what we need to be asking is not "If Open Source is good, why is it so buggy" but "If proprietary software spends 100 times the resources to produce a 10% better product, who has the better development model again?"
I'm a normal user. Not a tech... I run three windows boxes and a notebook on my home network. Three instances of XP pro and one instance of 200 pro.
I have auto-update active on all machines. i have antivirus, spyware, and adware programs running on all machines. None crash, none slow down, none are infected. And all of my machines were cheap. Dirt cheap.
I use firefox; I agree that internet explorer is a shitty browser.
The reason the average computer user doesn't switch off MS is because there is no reason to.
And for reference, all of my horrid computer experiences have been with Apple machines. I work in film, and the entire industry works off powerbooks. The last production company I freelanced for had huge problems with their Airport. Then three Powerbooks went down in the course of a month. Then a drive broke on a fourth powerbook. Ipods went dead, etc.
I find it interesting what Apple users are willing to put up with given the comparatively expensive hardware. At the same firm, they made fun of my Dell notebook and my HP pocket pc. But with a 1 gig sd card i had music and video for my pocket pc that synced seamlessly with my notebook (WMP 10), and my pocket PC was perfect for skyping/gaming/reading/PIMing with. I can imagine that my gadgets can do way more than comparable Apple products at a third of the total cost cost. And I was always working while their Powerbooks were on some UPS truck going to be serviced. In my book, I was the one who should have been doing the laughing.
All of which is to say, experiences are relative. I imagine that most users (myself included) don't switch from Windows machines because there is simply no need to. Wintel machines do what I need them to do at a cost I'm willing to pay.
un burrito me trampeó.
True, but still the article itself has a questionable thesis. He talks of OpenOffice as though it represents all open source software. In fact, there are thousands of open source programs which are used every day including at such companies as Microsoft. Or is no one at Microsoft using Perl, FTP or Emacs? That seems unlikely.
There is a tremendous and powerful set of server tools such as Apache web server, the aforementioned Perl, PHP, MySQL, and all the thousands of Unix/Linux command line programs that are used to run most of the world's servers. You would hardly expect Andrew Brown to complain of how limited and buggy Apache Web Server is and how much better Microsoft IIS is, not to mention Linux and MySQL and Perl/PHP--a laughable claim that would not be supported by the facts. This seems to sink his thesis; LAMP is the server to beat and has been a thorn in MS's side for years and are really your classic opensource, community-developed and supported applications.
I think it would be more fair to look at the bigger picture. Open source and public domain software pretty much dominates the back end, and on the front end Windows software rules. Yet, recent distributions of Linux are getting increasingly solid and easy to install and use. Recent versions of Firefox and OpenOffice and Gimp pretty much do everything any user will ever need, are solid and featureful and under constant development and improvement.
I think Brown is a bit impatient for the future to be here now. Is there room for improvement in the OSS model? Of course. Wait another year or two and (as he himself points out) version 3.1 of OOo will surely be fantastic, along with Linux kernel 2.8 and Firefox 3.5 and on and on. After a certain point, no commercial software will be worth the hundreds of dollars differential; the user experiences will be too close to call. There will be a natural shift away from Windows lock-in and we'll be buying our $100 laptops running Ubuntu or Suse or Fedora while Microsoft scrambles to be the next Google. Should be an interesting next five years or so.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Office 97 was a buggy pile of shit too, but heaps of people still use it and refuse to upgrade (or are bound to it by Access97 apps they refuse to rewrite/pay to rewrite), because it's "good enough".
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Let me make a humble suggestion: if the OSS community had the creativity to actually produce something BETTER than office, we might have something. So let's have a conversation about whether or not OSS is capable of real innovation on the scale of an office product, or if it's just about sticking it to the man with free software.
And when was the last time you updated Windows (or your drivers or what have you) or installed a non-trivial program? I'm guessing more than 24 days ago.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
whoever was in charge of the wierd half-assed pseudo MDI in Excel needs to be skinned alive and fed to ants
Seconded. It annoys me to no end that two open excel files appear as two toolbar buttons but are both within the same excel window. Why? I don't want to resort to your pseudo window manager to view two documents at once.
Note that all of the above was mozilla.org propaganda. It may or many not be true, but it was later admitted that most of the Netscape engineers thought it was untrue -- they would have been able to ship Version 5 in 1999 succesfully even with the legacy codebase.
As it was, Mozilla shipped in an extremely buggy form (Netscape 6) and didn't become acceptable to users until 2004
So, Better? Yes. "Smaller amount of time and probably with a even smaller budget"? Absolutely No.
And all of this was done at a fraction of the cost compared to things like IE.
I would like to see one shread of proof for that. AOL paid for a large Mozilla development team for four or five years. The cost was likely in the same ballpark as IE.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
> so the OOo core is more-or-less only developed by Sun
Yeah, if it wasn't for mean ol' Sun, there would be programmers lining up around the block to work on spreadsheet macro code and contextual help menus for free!
Or maybe, Sun does all the OOO dev because, frankly, nobody else would.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
This is the best short reply I have read on Slashdot in years. I can't believe it is only at +4 right now. I will only add one thing to yog's argument:
Sun sells StarOffice for support. Sun writes most of the code for OpenOffice and this code is used in StarOffice. Obviously Sun is in exactly the same place as Microsoft in terms of wanting to minimize the number of support calls.
Also a 100 full-time Sun employees is nothing to sneeze at. I don't need a more complicated OpenOffice for 3.0, I'm happy if most of the improvement (for a while anyway) is in speed and fewer bugs. 100 employees can do a lot of code optimization.
Dara
- I wish Sun had gone with SunOffice for their version and left the StarOffice name for the open source version -
That's the bug.
As Edward Tufte noted, "PowerPoint Makes You Stupid." And trying to make your dumbass slide deck into a mulimedia extravaganza makes sure everyone knows it. And that goes for other presentaion software, too.
That is all.
Do you just regard anything that is critical of something you love as flamebait? That isn't a very productive approach.
"The rest is some rant about OS people saying users can submit bug patches but hardly anybody does."
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Anybody using free software to write scientific papers either uses LaTeX or has rocks in their head.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Like hell he does. He is specifically singling out "programs intended for use by the non-programming public", which end up being supported by a very small group of people. Exactly how much of this article did you end up actually reading before you decided you disagree with his conclusion so there is no use considering his arguments?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Who says Windows won based on quality? And who says it was "Windows" that displaced Apple in the first place?
MS-DOS was a key component in creating the commodity personal computer - or at least commoditizing the hardware piece of it. And because it was a key, Microsoft rode the wave of commodity PCs that washed over the Industry (it should be noted that IBM set that wave in motion). Windows comes in as a partner (and later "replacement") to MS-DOS as a continued key component to cheaper, more open PCs.
Windows may be an important part of history - but it is far from a dominant role. Windows owes a lot to IBM and, even more so, Compaq for the position it is in now.
I appreciate the general sentiment of the comment. I'm not so sure the grandparent's comment makes much of an argument. But if you're going to make pithy remarks about history, it would help to have some perspective and appreciation for the rather interesting and complex set of events that transpired to put us in the place we are today.
First of all, OpenOffice 1.x is quite robust, mature, and reliable, with some known limitations, in particular in MS compatibility. I have seen some OpenOffice 2.0 bugs (mostly related to MS import), but 2.0 has a lot of improvements that make it worth living with the occasional bugs. Overall, OpenOffice is no different in terms of bugginess from most other large commercial desktop packages.
Is Microsoft Office faster and smaller than OpenOffice? Perhaps, but that's really not relevant. Office suites aren't in a pissing contest for speed or size. Software engineering involves a lot of tradeoffs and making an office suite faster than it needs to be is a waste of time and poor engineering practice. Also, OpenOffice solves a harder problem: it needs a cross-platform codebase (Microsoft just develops largely separate versions) and it needs to maintain compatibility with Microsoft Office.
Now, who is responsible for what OpenOffice is? OpenOffice was originally developed as a closed source piece of software. Much of the code is still that original code. Many of the decisions that are causing problems are still the decisions made back then. And development continues with developers supported by big companies. So, it is wrong to place the blame for OpenOffice's problems on open source. I think overall, open source has greatly contributed to OpenOffice and OpenOffice would be dead by now if it had remained closed source. On the other hand, without the initial proprietary effort, OpenOffice almost certainly wouldn't be as mature as it is.
Brown has some kind of bizarre model of open source in mind where it's only open source if a large portion of individual users contribute. But that's wrong. Open source is a licensing model that ensures access to source code, nothing more and nothing less, and OpenOffice fulfills that. Furthermore, in the case of an office suite, the "users" are big companies: when IBM wants to ship OpenOffice, IBM is the user, and IBM contributes (they happen to do so with software, donations and developers). And it is not necessary, and has never been the case, that a larger percentage of the user base contribute; a big user base is useful for an open source project even if most of the users are not developers. Finally, open source development has never been hugely efficient: open source projects usually take much longer to complete in real time than comparable proprietary projects; but that has never been a problem, and I don't see why it should be a problem now.
Overall, Brown is just confused: about software development, about engineering, and about open source. Maybe Brown should stick to commenting about things he knows something about.
(As for Brown's "most irritating bugs", I would classify them as WONT-FIX and NOT-A-BUG. If those are the biggest problems he has with OpenOffice, then OpenOffice is doing well.)
From my perspective, this is the "closed" portion of the open source movement, with the mindset that no commercial software, be it a Photoshop, AutoCad, Quicken, or an Oracle, has any place whatsoever. Personally, I pay for value received, and I value professional-grade tools. If FOSS has a viable alternative, then fine. If not, then that's fine too. For many of my uses, I don't want "good enough", I want, need, and demand the best.
Too many people let their various "religous" dogmas get in the way...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Brown makes some good points I suppose but they seem to me to be confined to being true about open office. I feel this has alot to do with the open office community process, and nothing to do with open office itself. I have contributed to quite a few open source projects, and I've tried to contribute to Open Office, but over there they make it hard to do. You have to jump through more hoops than even the mozilla foundation makes you jump through. Further, I've read through OOo's code, as well as the kernel, mozilla, firefox, kde (a bunch of projects there)... OOo's code is the most tangled pile of any open source project I've ever seen. I've never spent more than ~ a day on any other project to get a general feel and understanding of the code and how its laid out... I spent a week reading through OO, and I still don't even know the start from the middle... its a total mess.
In spite of all that, Brown still admits that OO is better for writing books than Word, and that Word 97 couldn't even print a 60k word manuscript... I'd imagine word 03 can do that, but I don't know. I use OO every day for everything, I haven't noticed a single "bug" in OO 2.0 that makes the software unusable. I use it for Invoicing, Code documentation, User documentation, creating pdf's of everything I write basically, project planning, opening word documents and excel spreadsheets, everything. I don't even have MS office installed on a single machine I use anymore (more than 20 machines). Does OO open slower than MS Office? Yeah a little... maybe 5 seconds... so what? Have I ever had it crash and lose a 50 page user manual? No not once! Has that happend with MS Office? Used to be a regular occurance!
The OO community process could use some work, its hard to contribute to the project, but, at the same time, for a free office suite, it works exceptionally well for me.
Ok, good point, but how large does the average project need to be? Besides an office suite, I think only serious audio/video editing applications, and possibly special purpose scientific/engineering/mathematical software, even have the potential to get "very" big (using a semi-arbitrary threshold for "very"). And games, maybe, but for games, a lot of this is content (as opposed to code), although there are other reasons open source gaming is not (and probably will not ever be) as successful as proprietary gaming. He's arguing that open source projects have limitations, but he's arguing it by looking at an open source project facing possibly the biggest challenges. Most open source projects will never hit issues like this. Some of his criticism still applies, but it's *not* a fair look at open source development in general.
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