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.'"
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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?)