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OpenOffice Illustrates Open Source's Limitations?

Posted by Zonk on from the thems-fightin-words dept.

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.'"

1 of 611 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The obvious question by slashdotnickname · · Score: 1, Troll

    All I know is, MS Office is almost physically painful to use for anything more complex than the simplest tasks. -- Daniel Dvorkin

    Ok troll...

    I recently worked on a Powerpoint presentation that imported both Excel numbers and data which was originally (and easily) imported from a MySQL database... part of which was hosted for preview as HTML pages on a company web server (all automated via VBScript so that changes were immediately reflected online)... guess that's a pretty simple task according to your imaginary standards.

    I hate having to defend myself by saying this... but I love open-source software, as evident by some of my most popularly used software: vlc, eclipse, azureus, shareaza, firefox... still, MS Office is powerfully good stuff, so much so that I find myself defending it against ignorant comments such as yours.

    So until OpenOffice catches up (and I'm cheering that they will because it would be FREE) it's well worth the price if you have tasks that demand such complex interactions of data.