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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actualy it is bashing closed source and praising OSS without even knowing it.
Staroffice was made public in 1986 and made OSS in july 2000. Its length is cca 10mio lines of code. It has made a lot of progress in last 5 years. Especially if you take the project length to account. And Staroffice had a lot more problems. It acted as complete desktop, which OO.o rid off. Bad language support. Even longer start times. A lot less functions.
Again, how hard is "many eyes" to make bigger and better result differs on few factors.
- was it always OSS? It is harder to maintain something you've not written
- how big it is? OO.o scales as very large project here
- How many eyes? In fact not so many as one would thought.
Taken these point to account I dare to proclaim OO.o is a success with a great future.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
...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.
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.
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
"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?"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.