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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.'"
Gnome es open source. And even though it's not perfect, I have 20 people using it on a daily basis at the office with no complaints.
I think that it makes absolutely no sense to project open office on all open source.
The problem is twofold. First, OpenOffice.org is anything *but* an 'open-source'; Sun basically owns any of the contributions that you submit to the project, so the OOo core is more-or-less only developed by Sun (please correct me if I'm wrong on this one). The codebase originally came from StarOffice, and given what they started with, I'd say that they've made a hell of a lot of progress -- OOo 2.0 is light-years ahead of what StarOffice used to be.
That being said, yes, OOo is pretty much crap and utterly useless for anything beyond basic office duties; its spreadsheet capabilities are laughable at best (no simplex or network model solvers), and what's an even bigger kicker (for me) is that you can't really use it on OS X!
Sure, you can run it in the X11 emulation layer, but one of the reasons I bloody switched to Apple was that I was very tired of dealing with X11 being useful only for displaying terminals. Why would I want to run X11 when I finally escaped from it? Oh, and if you do run OOo under X11.app, you don't get any of your local TrueType fonts (IIRC), or any of the integration that makes OS X so much a pleasure to work with, from a desktop perspective.
Don't get me started on NeoOffice. It's maintained by two guys who have better things to do with their time, and still suffers from the shortcomings of OOo, as well as some integration problems (i.e., it doesn't even use the native printing or file dialogues).
But these problems are endemic on a per-project basis; Firefox is an overall fantastic program, LaTeX is great as well, and libgaim powers AdiumX, which gets a lot of use on my system.
But someone has to come along and make something better than OOo; I've half a mind to do it myself, when I'm finding myself not working full-time as a UNIX sysadmin while going to school full-time.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
In addition it's a huge project with it's own paid set of developers.
So, like other FOSS apps, there may be many eyes on it, but they probably never even look at the source, let alone work on it. It's too big and complicated. And people are already being paid to work on it. Why should someone spend their free, spare time doing someone else's job?
It may be open source but I suspect that it's development hasn't been a very open process. This is just about the worst example in the FOSS world to use as a representative of how open source development works IMO.
OSS works great for software that geeks use. API libraries, text editors, programming utilities, etc... For software that normal people use, and geeks don't so much, like word processors and spread sheets, well of course it doesn't work so well. Why would it?
You deserve the insightful moderation. I was a StarOffice user (even paid for it) and I have found OpenOffice to be significantly more stable and less buggy. If anything, OpenOffice proves that the open source model works and the closed source model (that produced StarOffice) does not.
Not bad, I believe the problem is that OpenOffice already was a huge block of software when it became a success as StarOffice. I had SO 4 and it was slow but good back then, overintegrated. When the open source code was released "#define private public" was reported....
The number of bugs or contributors is really irrelevant and the article is wrong here. If SUN wants to encourage OO development, they shall organise at least 10 developer meetings per year. One in Hamburg, one Fosdem session, etc. etc. Inform people how to hack the sources.
But what really concerns is the inability of Sun and the community to modulize the stuff. E.g. enable third parties to produce a file conversion utility. Or reuse code of OO.org for other projects. E.g. the macro language.
OpenOffice 2.0 is fine for me and does 97% of what I want. Speedup would be nice but hardware will scale up faster than software gets optimized. What OO.org is lacking are user communities with sample files etc.
Sorry, but I don't use linux because it's 0.0001% less iritating. I don't use Firefox because it's 0.000001% more secure. That wouldn't have been enough to make me want to bother.
I'm not sure them being open is enough either. I like the idea of tinkering, and I even do that from time to time, but it's icing on the cake.
They are better, so much better that it's laughable to think that people still struggle with windows and IE.
OpenOffice does not come anywhere close to that. Being slightly better should not be the criteria we aim for, and it shouldn't be enough to deserve all the hype we're giving it.
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.
....
By the time that Mozilla inherented the code base.. it was a mess. It took years and years and years of constant developement and change to massage it back into a state were it was a superior system to IE.
Then it took even more development on top of that to get it to the point were you had good/attractive UI design in the form of Firefox, Thunderbird, etc etc.
And all of this was done at a fraction of the cost compared to things like IE.
Then you have konqueror and such that didn't have a legacy code base to deal with and they pumped out a nice browser themselves in a smaller amount of time and probably with a even smaller budget.
And anyways.. if OO.org 3.1 does kick ass, and even if it is still done with help from IBM/Google/Sun/etc etc doesn't that mean that the open source still works?
None of those companies by themselves would be capable of competing with MS on MS's own terms. (basicly document and feature and user compatability with MS's office on MS's OS in a MS dominated market)
If you're a developer on the OO project, and you're writing macros, then yes - you're going to find bugs. Most likely you'll find a bunch of em. That's what you get when you're under the hood, twiddling with the application. However, as an end user, I've yet to encounter any bugs with Open Office. It pains me to no end that I have to use MS Word to write my current book assignment. It is so full of problems that I can't get past 30 pages without encountering major problems. With OO, I can have 100+ page documents, with embedded graphics, and not have any problems at all.
I've seen these same types of issues when I worked for Ashton-Tate. We had 100+ developers working on dBASE IV. And what did we release? A bug filled application that induced the death of the company. Meanwhile, a group of 6 developers worked on a dBASE compiler environment that worked great! Seems the more developers you throw at a project then the less communications between them and the more bugs you end up encountering. I would hate to see this happen with OO. But then, if the project managers keep a good handle on it, then the rest of us "end users" will be quite content and happy to use OO instead of the bloated MSO products.
Tim Trimble
The ART of software Development
TheTiminator
I'm not going to dispute a single point Brown made in that article because I have all of the same gripes about OpenOffice, which I started using way back when it was still being produced by Stardivision. I will, however, point out that Brown's remarks do NOT apply to the majority of open source software I have used - the exception being almost every Linux distro I ever used. Most open source apps are tiny and slick, don't need more than a few people (often one will do the job just fine) to document or fix them. OpenOffice is a rarity in the Open Source world - a bloated pile of cruft that just keeps growing. But most Open Source software was not created by a company with a bloat fetish before being bought out by another company with a bloat fetish, and then released as Open Source software to a crowd of bloat fetishists all looking to take down another bloat fetishist.
What the Open Source community needs to take from Brown's article, and plenty of other critiques of Open Office, is that it's time to stop holding up Open Office as a shining success story. Pick something better, like Firefox, or the ability of BSD to adapt to everything from DVD players to cars to OS X.
I see no reason why a word processor (ignoring the other suite components) could not be made as a mozilla-based app. The rendering of pretty text is there, and Firefox's CSS is so nice we get everything we need now. Even columns, just recently. Doubt you'd need to write new XPCOM for it. (maybe only for importing msword, even pdf export will be possible with cairo)
The big question is, if we can easily and quickly make a world class word processor, how do we make it? Do we mindlessly ape Word down to the last little toolbar button placement? How do we make it sensible, instead of doing only what has been done before?
I am working on just such a project myself. Finally have it using data URIs for embedded pictures/objects. Formatting is still wonky. Splitting paragraphs across a page still doesn't work right either. Unlike OOo though, mine outputs plain XHTML files, can be opened up in notepad. No zip archives of a thousand file components (sorry, but I do not like binary formats).
I think you missed the point. He said that large and complex software is large and complex. Armies of developers don't neccesarily help that much either, when it gets bug. He's saying all large and complex software is bound to have bugs, which currently, the way we program, true. I don't know that the problem is even solvable short of complex AI. Good luck.
Now, compare this to codebase for OpenOffice, which while almost as old as a product as MS Word, was purchased by sun about six years ago, and only has been open sourced for 5. Factor in the time for new management, new developers, and new priorities, and MS Word has a significant advantage. The advantage for MS Windows over Linux is even greater. This is not even counting the massive resources that MS can throw at a project. Just look at XBox. In fact comparing Linux to MS Windows is like comparing MS Windows to Mac OS. In both cases one has a latecomer to the market compared to a forerunner.
For the record I used MS Word on many platforms up to a few years ago. I moved to openoffice.org because the feature set was complete enough, and was reliable enough. Continuing to use MS Office was not even worth the minimal cost of an educational license. I don't find it any less reliable than Office, and certainly has no problem opening up the Word files I recieve. In education one regualarly recieves word files from many different versions, as many people use older machines.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I don't want to feed the trolls here, but let me just say this:
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.
Even if BSODs are ``so last year," the fact is that Windows is poorly designed and poorly executed to the point of fostering bad habits and very low expectations in its users. So, suckitude is this year's BSOD.
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
An "Open Source project" is worthy, but just an "open licensed project" isn't anything special, is what I'm taking from the parent poster, a man who should know.
It's difficult as me, a consumer and advocate of what I call "good software", to understand what's good to back. The FOSS, F/LOSS, or whatever the hell they're calling the community nowadays has a branding problem. I think the devs are the only ones who can solve it.
OpenOffice needs more user input to be workable in an office environment. While the software's interface is much improved over the StarOffice that Sun purchased, it needs the touch of the lay person's input. Microsoft was able to do this for their suite by locking some clerical people in a room with close monitoring. But that was so many years ago...
Microsoft Office is the only thing a lot of people have had access to in order to get their jobs done. People have abused it so much -- spreadsheets for accounting instead of databases; word processors for automated reporting; OLE embedding video in documents. But now, thanks to Open Source projects, they will have access to the proper tools for the job. If they can only find them!
I'm much happier popping open Abiword or Gnumeric than loading OpenOffice. Small, light apps with a responsive desktop environment are what I like to get work done. The PHB's can ooh and aah over their little office macro apps all they want. I have entire programming suites at my disposal to leverage my limited knowledge!
The time of the office suite has passed.
What OOo needs is a small, speedy and bloat-free word processor. (Which must also be well-featured/compatible with Word/OOo package)
This would be similar to Firefox's exocytosis from the behemoth Mozilla, and allow the majority of people, who just need a program to write a letter, to use OOo without the bloat.
You know, though, it's actually quite stable as long as some gullible schmuck isn't using it.
Bullshit. I'm down with the message that windows has gotten better, but saying IE is stable is bullshit. My wife and I have run a comparison... IE just pukes about as often as Konqueror does, which is approximately every 4 hours of serious use. Then there is the spyware issue. You shouldn't have to be paranoid in order to use a web browser without fear of it fscking your system, but if you are anything but with IE, you're just asking for trouble.
As for Windows XP stability... Yeah, it's great. Follow this rule: Don't install any software and just use windows and office apps and everything will be fine. Start loading it up with all that great software that won't run under Linux, and it's only a matter of time before you'll be playing the registry restore game... or worse.
But it has gotten better. It just, when it comes to home users, it isn't where it needs to be. The biggest problem is XP still encourages users to run with Admin privileges. As long as users are doing that, it's an accident waiting to happen. While this is true of all modern operating systems, that it is dangerous to run with Admin privileges, XP seems to encourage it out of the box for the home user. That really needs to change. And the system needs to be engineered to be protected from third party apps destabilizing it.
I would like to see XP deal with admin privileges the way Suse does... When something needs to be an Administrator, just prompt for the admin password. Having to log out and login as another user is big PITA and a block to home users not running with admin privileges.
If XP can do this already, I haven't seen how, so please correct me if it can as that would help a few of my home customers.
The hanging intentation thing needed for APA? Easy... Do a hard enter on the second line of text, then backspace the line. Highlight the sentence (or sentences to indent, then go to Formant...Paragraph. Under special, choose hanging and indent by 0.2" (that is usually equiv to 4 characters which is the style I've been using).
To me, assuming OO were sped up, and it retained the same GUI, I cannot get used to it enough to be productive. I've found the menus too unintuitive to figure out. If they would kindly copy MS, I would use it.
iWorks is a nice program. I've been trying Pages for a while as well. I only wish Apple had chosen to make it more of a word-processor and less of a Desktop Publishing app. Maybe in 2.0. It does a great job with a Resume (about all I use it for). Keynote, though, is a bloody impressive app.
an enormous (and enormously-complex) codebase that was originally crafted under the "cathedral" model
... no wonder nobody hacks on it!
Not to mention that half the comments are in German.
I'm a native English speaker, and my German is pretty good (all of high school + a few years in college), and I can't figure out that crap.
Many eyes make bugs shallow, true, but you can always find ways to sink it. Putting the source in two separate (spoken) languages is a pretty good one.
Openoffice is special in that its barrier to entry is higher than any other project I've ever seen -- including the Linux kernel. I know C++ and Java, English and German, and how to download and build pretty much any program I run across. And I want to improve OOo. On paper, I look like the perfect candidate for this. But in truth, its build system is weird and complex, its source code is weird and complex, its architecture is weird and complex
Yes. To get the full benefit of Open Source, you need a big enough community to drive work for many different agendas rather than mostly one agenda. The problem is tha OO is still mostly Sun. If this were GNOME, for example (which is a project upon which Sun shares work as am equal partner with a large community) quality would be higher.
And all of this makes me sad because the program is so important to the Linux desktop.
OO is Open Source because it's Open Source licensed. The OpenOffice project falls somewhat short of achieving all of the benefits of an Open Source project due to a lack of community, and that in turn is due to some of Sun's decisions about the project policies and about their corporate communications concerning Open Source over several years.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I have a similar view of OpenOffice to you, I think. I'm grateful to those who choose to give it away, because it helps me to do some things I'd otherwise find inconvenient without paying for software since I don't install illegal copies of commercial products. However, I have no illusions about the power or quality of the product, nor its overtaking MS Office in any significant way any time soon.
In fact, without wishing to seem ungrateful, OpenOffice doesn't really have much going for it over its major commercial rival at all, other than being free-as-in-beer. There are countless useful ways a word processor could do better than Word, making real people more productive at real jobs or giving nicer output for jobs they already do, yet in five years of Microsoft not really addressing any of the issues, the open source world has failed to do anything particularly innovative, preferring to play a never-ending game of catch-up with the market leader.
What I really wanted to challenge, though, was this statement in the parent post:
Perhaps, but look at it this way. We know, just by looking at popular OSS sites like this one and the download stats from OSS web sites, that OSS provides a few big-name, mass-market products: Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla et al., that sort of thing. It also provides a wider range of fairly established tools for more specialised niches. And then it provides mountains of rubbish, most of which never gets to version 1.
Now, the list of advantages given by advocates of the OSS approach often starts with things being less buggy and more secure, on the basis of the "many eyes" principle mentioned in TFA. This claim is usually backed up by citing the relative scarcity of security breaches in Linux-based systems, the relative immunity of Firefox to nasty web pages, and so on. OSS is also claimed by some advocates to produce more innovative software, basically because the developers aren't tied to company conventions, can adapt faster to changing requirements from users, etc.
However, if -- as the author of TFA argues based on actual bug and feature request data -- you can't necessarily rely on user support to improve a product even for probably the largest and most widely used products of the OSS world, that blows that whole argument out of the water. OpenOffice isn't less buggy than MS Office, nor innovative in any serious way; it's a near carbon copy of the established commercial player, a few years behind the times in features and robustness. And if the OSS approach doesn't achieve the claimed benefits for OpenOffice, why should it provide any advantage for smaller products with smaller user bases?
To an extent, there is a genuine answer to this question. As I've discovered myself, the code base for products like OpenOffice and Firefox is simply too big for a keen amateur to get stuck into within a reasonable period of time. Just downloading the source and getting a build set up is often a chore for the many of us who are running Windows boxes, because so many products tend to be built using GCC on Linux or something similar. Smaller, less unwieldy projects might fare better here. But then again, does something like OpenOffice or Firefox really need to be the size they are, or is the source just bloated as a result of the less structured development processes that are inevitably used when software is being built by a constantly varying and geographically diverse group of volunteers?
In other words, while I agree that it's unsound to generalise too much from the author's factual data on a specific OSS product, that product does offer a pretty solid counter-example to the usual arguments advanced by OSS evangelists for the superiority of their approach over traditional closed source, commercial development.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Closed source produces a lot of good code, but you never get to see it (unless you work on it) becuase it stays closed.
Free Hans!
That depends on whether that extra 10% makes a difference to how well you can do what you need to do, I suppose.
FWIW, my experience is rather different to yours: whether you call them bugs or usability issues, I find quite a lot of the non-trivial functionality in OOo is bizarrely hard to use. Updating data that you're using elsewhere seems to be particularly troublesome: try updating a Calc spreadsheet you're using as a data source for a Writer mail merge, for example. I also find even simple adjustments of graphs in Calc difficult at times: I have actually found myself unable to tweak basic elements once a graph was created, even after extensive consultation with the generally unhelpful built-in help and the usually much more helpful Internet. Compared to this sort of thing, the equivalent features in Word and Excel are effortless to use.
On the flip side you have things like Word's "interesting" numbering tools. This is clearly an area where usability didn't quite work out as well as it should have and which has strangely never been fixed. Then again, I find Writer's just as counter-intuitive. Overall, and obviously just IME, OOo applications still have a lot more usability quirks/UI bugs. YMMV, of course, and by the sounds of it, it has.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Brown quotes George Ou's "comparison" of Excel with OOo 2.0's Calc.
Like many of Ou's comparions, he loads the deck. For example, Ou claims FireFox has as many bugs and security holes as IE6 and even gives the nod to IE6. What he doesn't say is that his data is flawed. While FireFox is developed in full view of the public, with the users contributing to and able to browse the bug database, the users of IE6, including Ou, are kept in the dark about IE6 security holes until Microsoft decides to patch and announce them. So, while he reports ALL the FireFox bugs, he can only report the IE6 bugs that Microsoft allows to be made public, which exprience has shown is much lower in number than the actual IE6 bugs and holes. Ou's conclusion: FireFox has as many bugs and holes as IE6.
The Excel vs Calc comparison was just as loaded, just as slanted and just as impractical. It goes without saying that NO ONE in the real world uses a spreadsheet the way Ou used it, contrary to his claim. IN fact, Ou's spreadsheet was both impractical and worthless. The 'test' was merely a test of load times, comparing Excel with OOo2's Calc. The Excel file was in Excel's format as a 16 sheet spreadsheet with 32K rows per sheet, each row having 13 text fields with a total length of about 128 characters, IIRC. Why didn't Ou post his ODT file as an ODT file for OOo2? Why did he have to convert it to an SXW format to force those who would test his work to reconvert it back to the ODT format? The real question is, why was Ou using a spreadsheet when a database was called for. Ou reported that Excel loaded its Excel spreadsheet in 38 seconds and Calc loaded its ODT spreadsheet in 141 seconds. I don't own Excel but I did download his SXW spreadsheet, converted it to ODT and timed how long it took to load it. I, too, got around 140 seconds load time.
However, as a programmer I want to use the right tool for the job, and playing with 500,000 rows of text data isn't a job for a spreadsheet, it is a job for a database. So, using OOo 2.0's database capabilities I converted the ODT spreadsheet into a database. That took only a minute or so. Testing the load time as a database I found it to take less than ONE SECOND!!. Then I let OOo 2.0 automatically create a form, using its form autopilot, with which I could view, search, navigate, add, edit or delete the data. That also took less than a minute to do.
Then, I thought about timing how long it would take Excel to do those things I did with OOo 2.0, but I discovered that Excel doesn't have a database, it doesn't have a form autopilot, so the time it would take to do those things would be infinite. So, by Ou's logic, OOo 2.0 is infinitely faster than Excel.
Browns other criticisms can be as easily dismissed. By relying on Ou's slanted work to prop up his smear of OOo, Open Source and the Baazar, Brown has unmasked himself as a Microsoft shill of the worst kind... Mimiking the wolf who wore grandma's clothing in his attempt to kill Little Red Riding Hood, Brown is trying to kill FOOS while wearing a Penquin suit.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Nice post - informative.
.so) would be a nice start.
Just to mention that Neo Office http://www.neooffice.org/ was born due to no native version available under OS X. Its only available in a 1.x source tree due to the massive undertaking required to get it work.
I wish Sun would do a better job and make it run natively under OS X, get rid of those static assigned libraries (.dll /
Also some beautiful / appealing templates in Oo such as those which are available in Apple's Pages would be fabulous.
I run Office under OS X because I can't afford any threat of loosing format, my documents heavily rely on templating and styles for consistancy across documents with other collegues.
But I put everyone else on Oo, its a great platform for those who don't require so reliance on formatting.
German comments aren't so hard to figure out. "puffer" is "buffer", and we have machine translation these days, so I'm not so sure that's the problem with OpenOffice. Also, the KDE team has a large Norwegian and German complement. It could be the code is hard to understand, but look at the Linux kernel, which is no picnic to understand and has an incredible community.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I am not very knowledged with regard to printing frameworks. But would it be possible for a PDF exporter implemented as a virtual printer to still do things like creating table of contents, provide clickable intra-document links as well as clickable external hyperlinks?
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Shhh - you'll annoy the zealots, and it seems like they're hungry.
Hell, I've only rebooted my current XP machine twice - once to install a video driver update, and a second time when a game crashed the same driver. XP didn't even go down during that crash - it apparently switched itself to a generic driver and gave me a dialog explaining the situation and recommend I reboot to fix it.
As a matter of fact, the only blue screen I've had in the last three years was a dead DIMM. I'd call that a fair reason for the OS to go down. Actually, I'd be pissed if it didn't under those circumstances.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
The primary cause of my use of OO is that when I set up a new computer, I can't be bothered to dig through my binder of CDs to find the MSOffice discs. Seriously. To me, OO is the Office-equivalent-that-I-need-not-find-the-damn-CD -for. It's got a nice feature set and a pretty swanky interface, but I would consider the two suites equal, as OO does become a bit of a hassle when I've got multiple apps open.
And what exactly is a "non-trivial" program?
/" and "del /F /S /Q C:\*.*". Both command do essentially the same thing, except that while the RM command pretty much wipes the linux box, the DEL command left a lot of files behind, ones the OS and other apps were using. The linux box started acting pretty oddly and quickly crashed. The Windows box continued to run, though with severely degraded abilities. They rebooted both boxes and the Linux box was completely borked. The Windows box gave the well known "NTLDR is missing" error. However, once NTLDR was replaced, the box actually booted up to a login prompt.
I've installed Office 2003, VirtualPC, Windows Media Player 10, Visual Studio 2005, and more... all without rebooting. Even the last version of Symantec Anti-virus I installed didn't want to reboot until after I had run LiveUpdate, and that was because it couldn't replace some Symantec files because they were in use. Nothing to do with Windows.
Most (decent) installers don't require a reboot anymore. The place where you'll still see them are when the program intertwines with the OS or is trying to modify something which is locked by the OS or another (misbehaving really) application. Even most newer Windows Updates don't require a reboot, depending on what you're doing when you run the update. If you've done as suggested and closed all running apps then the odds of needing to reboot are less.
It's important to remember that one reason Windows needs to reboot more for system changes is in part because of the file access model it uses. On Linux, stuff is loaded into memory and the file is pretty much ignored from then on. In Windows, when a program is using a file or the registry it can (and by default does) lock it to prevent other processes from modifying it.
I saw a comparison once (can't find it now) showing what happens if you run the commands "rm -rf
Anyway, the point is that as the consumer line of Windows has grown into the NT kernel it's gotten better and a lot of things including stability, uptime, and rebooting. Unfortunately the old 9x, NT, and 2000 claims of all these problems simply won't go away along with the old versions of Windows to which they were tied.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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I dunno; OpenOffice.org works for me. It does everything I need, without alienating me with drastically new features. It also has the added bonus of not needing to be installed on a win32 system. That means I can load it at work (SC Kiosks, the sam's club wireless kiosk, a Wholly Pwned Subsidiary of Radioshack) without tripping any of the windows policy restrictions.
I impressed my district and regional managers with a few spreadsheets and documents I put out with OO.org (2.0), and showed 'em what happens when they give productive people useful tools.
I count Open Office (at least, version 2, which is LIGHTYEARS in usability ahead of 1) as a very useful tool.
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
This article bothered me for some reason earlier this evening and when I came back, I realized why. First of all, it's defining the bugs in question. I have been a VERY close observer and participant of the OOo program and I think I know what the vast majority of bugs are dealing with: MS Word compatibility.
.DOC (oh mighty 'standard' that it is today) as well or better than OOo 2.0? Even Abiword with it's years of refinement can't handle .DOC's fields near as well as OOo 2.0.
You can't really blame the OOo team for that, can you? It's hard enough to create an open, expandable format but then to have to convert a closed-source, purposefully obfusticated format (.DOC) to your own (.ODT)...? Can ANY of you name a single non-MS related program that handles
Folks, there have been documents written many years ago in the 3.1 versions of Office that a user here couldn't read with Office XP and yet OOo managed to read them just fine. Then you've got the Wordperfect conversion stuff, the PDF and Flash exports, etc. I'd say the team has done an excellent job with everything - especially when you see the original code (StarOffice 5).
I don't doubt that much of what the article's author says is true. Sometimes it seems that development is moving at a snail's pace. But I'd rather they do that than have them release something clearly not ready for prime time. I'd say they accomplished a great deal of refinement and polish with 2.0 and am really looking forward to the great bibliography project slated for inclusion with OOo 3.0.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
But that's the thing--it doesn't represent all "programs intended for use by the non-programming public". If I were to contribute to an existing open source project, I'd look at just about everything else before looking at OO. OO is scary. It's a bajillion megs big, it encompasses a full office suite, and it's a single project. Sure, you probably don't need to know that much about Calc if you're working on Writer, but they're still tied together. I can't think of any other open source project that's quite as monolithic. I'd much rather work on something twenty times smaller.
And there are plenty of projects that are "intended for use by the non-programming public" that are twenty times smaller. Heck, the open source poster child Firefox is twenty times smaller (assuming binary size roughly correlates with size of code base, which should be fair). Brown raises some interesting points, but I think many of OpenOffice's problems really are unique to OpenOffice.
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
> Closed source produces a lot of good code, but you never get to see it (unless you work on it) becuase it stays closed.
Really? Because I have worked for a wide variety of closed-source companies over the last 25 years, and I have seen very little of this "good code" you refer to. One of the things that seriously attracted me to open source/free software in general was the much higher standards of coding that most of the developers seemed to adhere to.
Of course, maybe things have improved since I dumped Windows for once and for all back in '98, but somehow, I find it unlikely.
>If Linux is so much better than Windows, why hasn't Linux displaced Windows
>on the desktop market, like Windows displaced Apple?
Windows never displaced apple on the desktop, IBM PC and the clones (running *DOS*) overtook apple 2. Even when the macintosh with Mac OS came out, people still preferred the command line DOS over a state of the art (at the time) graphical interface. Apple *never* caught up with PCs again.
It just means that there are many other important factors, it's not just a question of which system is the best... In this example Apple had killer features: Graphical, multitasking (sort of) interface, faster machines etc.. but they couldn't come back, mostly because of the snowball effect and the open architecture of IBM PC.
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
The fact that OpenOffice (an especially poor choice of OSS poster child, but whatever) is even within an order of magnitude of Office (with literally hundreds of developers and tens of millions of dollars behind it) is simply astonishing.
Not really: most of the development happened when it was a commercial product (which had a fairly large niche market in Germany, AFAIR). For me, the damning thing about the whole OO saga from the OSS point of view is how little truly revolutionary has happened since Star Office went open source.
And before all the OSS groupies throw a hissy fit, have a look here for Linus totally agreeing with the statement
Virtually serving coffee
When considering what Stallman wrote, it is insane for anyone to think he meant my grandmother when he said there would be more users contributing code and fixing bugs. Yet, this seems to be what Mr. Brown thinks it meant.
OO is an absolutely *huge* and complex project that nobody but the "elite" can really program and I think that is no secret. Crap, I have been using Unix/Linux for 17 years and couldn't even get OO to *compile*. But Stallman's premises *do* work for much of the Open Source world. Even for large projects- look at the Linux kernel, for example. Fixes and enhancements are super-fast and furious.
Just because the OO project might have less community coding than other projects, doesn't make it a FOSS failure. It started life as a commercial project and it is the largest FOSS project in the world. The barrier to entry is very high. He completely discounts the importance of the non-code contributions to OO- artwork, documentation, website, marketing, feedback, bug reports, etc. Much of which is extremely important to the project and the success of OO.
I have submitted several bug reports to OO in the past, and sure enough, they were all fixed in the next release. I have submitted several more bug reports for the new OO 2.0, and I have every confidence they will be fixed in the next release.
Me thinks Mr. Andrew Brown is sour grapes. Are there more *code developers* for OO than for MS-Office? No. Does that surprise me? No. If the OO project had billions of dollars to spend on the project (like MS does), there would be much more. And OO has come a *long way* since the release of the StarOffice 5.X code to the FOSS community... much further than it could have, if the code remained a protected part of Sun. OO is a success in almost every way you look at it, and being FOSS is the main reason.
I think the author generalizes too much from a single particular case. OpenOffice started life as a closed source project and it still has a dependency on a source closed project (StarOffice). The only other project similar to it was the Netscape/Mozilla and look what happened to it. It took a hell of a long time, but finally it leveraged the benefits of Open Source with Firefox and Thunderbird. COmpare this with other Open source projects for the Dekstop like the Gimp. Has anyone been stomped by bugs in the Gimp? I think the bugs come from the initial closed source development and it takes longer to iron them out than in a Open Source project from the get go...
but Dan Quale still invented the internet right?
No we have to agree the RMS is one of the noisiest and most visible to the unwashed masses; rather like Firefox and OpenOffice. Perhaps we should promote these projects as corporate open source projects rahter than the more commonly percieved community open source projects.
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