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.'"
If Windows is such a success, why is it so buggy?
Large, complex pieces of software, generally have bugs, becuase they are large and complex.
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.
"Many eyes make bugs shallow" - it's still true.
It's just there aren't many eyes in there.
I think I saw some GNOME developer on the street corner, with a cardboard sign that read: "Please, please, PLEASE work on OpenOffice? Pretty please?"
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?
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
I've not used it every day, but I've not had any trouble with OO.o. I've disabled the Java in the Tools Options too, and it starts quicker than before, but it's not crashed on me once. I recommend it to all of my friends when they moan about the price of MS Office.
Oh You POS
I use open office as it does the job fine for my basic needs and it's free but in general with open source your going to get less refined stuff that's dependant more upon random people putting in a few hours here and there unless a company like IBM donates paid workers. I mean proprietary capitalistic stooges out of college may not be l33t visionaries but they are in teams being paid to do stuff and they do stuff ... guaranteed weekly $ attracts many quality people in the world who will work 9-5 to get stuff done. This is why at the end of the day Linux will have an equivilant for EVERYTHING that exists on OSX or XP or whatever but it's always going to lack the refined standardized feel that most people like in a finished product.
If you look at what Open Office has achieved, it is impressive. Sure MS Office is the defacto standard and is quite acceptable, but Open Office is very usable and not anymore buggy than other complicated applications. And to think that it had to deal with deciphering the everchanging MS filetypes... is it perfect, no... is it impressive, indeed.
gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/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.
I remember how absolutely buggy the first several versions of office was, especially compared to Word Perfect. However, tons of people used it because it was free, "it sucks but it's free." (actual quote)
I'm in charge of rolling out new Window's systems to Dr.'s offices and I've introduced them all to OpenOffice and they all love it. All they really want to do is to be able to compose letters and such and they love that they don't have to pay the expensive fee for having that on everyone's PC.
I think that OpenOffice is a sucess and that it will, in time, continue to get much better.
Just the only (bad) alternative.
Firefox is the success, and openoffice isn't even close to being a firefox. It's not even a pre-firefox mozilla... it might not even be the netscape 2 that would wait 2 more versions before being opened up to become the mozilla project.
Open Office illustrates my greatest fear for open source, that it will be so hyped that anything claiming open source status is put up against the likes of commercial software, and that this will be used to show just how amateurish we are.
Yes, it's called "maximizing shareholder value".
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?
...the most popular browser will obviously be the most popular to target. What, you think people are going to try to exploit a browser that doesn't hold the majority marketshare? When/if Firefox overtakes IE, you will see the number of Firefox vulnurabilities jump tenfold...
-everphilski-
I agree; OOffice is slow, bloated and full of still really obvious bugs (try writing a full stop in japanese; it'll end up in the upper right corner of the character cell, not the lower left). I much prefer the leaner, faster Abiword (still buggy, but at least the bugs have a snappy feeling), and most of all, Gnumeric over any other spreadsheet out there.
OOffice does have its place as a Word alternative, however. That's the kind of package it is aiming to be after all, and that brings with it most of the drawbacks. It's good for viewing and editing Word and presentation files. And if your basis of comparison is Word, you have different ideas on what constitutes bloat anyhow.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>>
I have written numerous macros (which automate less obvious, or screamingly obvious, tasks), including the word count for version 1.
Not to detract from his points - bringing more focus can't hurt in the long run - but around 1.2 days I surfed the bug database and found an amazing number of bugs relating to
I wondered what was up with that. I was more concerned about printer bugs and other bugs. Rather funny to see him raise that flag though.
There are at least two other open source suites out there. Its too bad that they only run well on Linux, but they are being ported to Windows and OSX.
If you are going to make comments on Open Source ability to make office software, you would need to comment on those. Especially since they are both open source right from the beginning, unlike OO which has commercial origins.
In my experience all the components of Koffice work really well. Gnumeric has many advanced features and continues to be intensively developed. AbiWord still needs some polishing IMO.
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)
OpenOffice is evolving from one of the buggiest, most bloated office suites it has ever been my displeasure to use. It's not yet as good as it should be, but it's a major improvement over what it used to be.
When I took a sofware project managment course in grad school, there was a stat that only 1 in 6 software projects are successful (on time, budget, etc.)
Lots of software projects have problems. So finding one project with bugs or bloat in the open-source world, proves what exactly? That there is more than one way not to be perfect.
Each path has pro's and con's. And a model is not a substitute for leadership, planning, and good contributors.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
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
Woops. Reading again it looks like the distinction I make between Open Source and Free Software isn't clear. Well, it's not in the license, and maybe not really in the code. Yet there is a difference anyway, even if it's only(?) ideological.
Of course all users have different wants and needs, but OpenOffice.org is the piece of software that allows me to maintain very good MS Word compatibility and ok excel compatibility. What other software out there can do that? Is WordPerfect even good at it? I don't know, but OOo is keeping me afloat for my college needs, and there are no show-stopping bugs at all (I can't even think of bugs off the top of my head, although I'm sure there are a handful as with any software project).
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
...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.
I disagree. My company uses a variety of proprietary (WinTel, WebSphere, DB2, etc) and open source (Linux, FF, Eclipse, etc) software and we have seen some real high quality work in both camps (and bad ones too). And to say that the open source code is stolen from for-profits is untrue and disingenuous. Many governments, not to mention Fortune 500's, are using open source. Some of these entities are very, very careful institutions--they won't dabble in stolen code (too much to lose). Witness SCO vs. IBM.
Try clicking only once
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?
I've always seen open source software as a subset of the method we've used to get to the level of technical knowledge we have now - publish results and what you did to get them so that other people can read it and peer review weeds out the snake oil as well as the genuine mistakes.
Last week, I was invovled in the data migration of and old, 5 year running dbase program to a brand new LAPM program.
The data, needed to be transformed, 3 days of tools development for the migration, and we were all set.
The procedure, we took, was: Transform document to csv, take the csv with php, create database, add pre-studied indexes, and run migration tool...
So far, so good.
Windoze machines, with Office 2000, Linux server 3.0 gighz with 1 gig ram, and 2 laptops, 1 G3 power book with OpenOffice 1.x and the other a dell with suse 9.0 and OpenOffice 2.0 beta.
We were using, a data sample, not larger than 45k rows x 1500 rows...
Ok.. on you marks, set.. GO!.
And widnows 2000 + office 2000, excel was able to open de dbf file, which was chopped to smaller databases, but were unable to handle the single 90megs csv files over a PIV 1gig ram... I tried with my openoffice at my G3 with yellowdog and the 64k limit row was suprassed with the csv file, we tried the openoffice 2.0 over the dell laptop with 640mb of ram.. and THERE WAS IT! the WHOLE file LOADED and ready to be manipulated by the preprocesing team!!!!
We tried to download openoffice for windows to the widowze machine, and for strage reasons, no luck, we were unable to install it, so we switched to underpowered user window station with 256 megs of ram, it accepted the openoffice, and we were able to do our migration task...
I was working only at my ibook, and my partner was only using phpmyadmin, and quanta. The process was going to slow becose Openoffice and the 256 megs machine, so we let our SuSe laptop to the other team,and instead mounting the data with samba, we used fish, becose the fileserver was already a linux server, my partner took my ibook, and I took the server console...
And the work was done...
And linux AND, mostly OpenOffice saved the day...
I use openoffice as a daily basis at my G3, I don't need any other feature coming with the 2.0 version...
My father uses also OpenOffice, he is a doctor. OpenOffice, lacks a lot, but its MUCH MORE stable than Office.
Â_Â
Is this true? Can I prove it? Mathemetically, I am "parsing" his statement as
N(B,U) = O(k^f(B,U))
for some constant k and unknown function f(B,U) where N(B,U) is the number of calls given B bugs and U users. Intuitively, I feel that the number of calls should be proportional to the number of bugs times the number of users. The idea being that we can expect some proportion of the users to bitch about each bug some bounded number of times, so N(B,U) = c*d*B*U where c is the proportion of users who will bitch about bugs and d is the maximum number of times they will call about the same bug. This is not exponential of course but insteads scales proportional to B and U. Someone explain what f(B,U) could be to justify this guy's "exponential" claim.
"Recursive bipartite matching"- try it!
Yes, that does annoy me, But is that proof that open source just can't produce good enough software?
It is still hardly OSS, in that it's fucking huge and not everyone has the time or inclination to get involved. Judging all of OSS by this particular piece of software is, well, fucking ridiculous. And come to think of it, Office(TM) was in the past -- I don't know if it still is, haven't used anything more recent than Office 97, mostly because later versions don't work with our databases very well due to *new* bugs. BTW, I had no hand in building the Access(TM) frontends for this garbage in question, of course, it *is* up to me to fix it all... *sigh* -- an awfully buggy software suite.
I'm sorry, but OSS is way too diverse to paint it all with one brush like such assholes are wont to do. FOAD.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Filed a bug report?
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.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
He makes some good points, but he is kind of picking on OpenOffice which, though popular, is hardly the poster-child of Open Source. The code was a mess long before it became open source. It took a lot of work to get it to even compile after it was open sourced. It uses it's own set of widgets, storage database, and even build system (i.e: it doesn't follow the code reuse principles of most of the successful open source projects). It takes a long time to get up to speed with the code before you can even hope to do anything with it. All of those, I would say, contribute to the reasons why OpenOffice is not "supported by the community." But there are quite a few large and very successful open source projects that do work on the principles the author was trying to refute. Mozilla, Gnome/KDE, Inkscape, Gnumeric, Abiword, Linux, GCC, XOrg, Apache.... So I wouldn't walk around saying the open source model has failed just yet.
Did you miss the part where he complained that it took 100 times longer to open a document in OOo than in MSO? Please reread.
Brown is obviously far from unbiased; he seems to base much of his points on a ZDnet blog post by George Ou and bashes its' detractors, while it's patently obvious that Ou's "performance comparison" is a shoddy and misleading piece of work (for instance, witness this comment thread).
"We don't stop playing games because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing games.."
If one pays for Windows, why should they pay the bugs ?
At least bugs in open source don't cost a dime !
.
I remember last year I was using Microsoft excel to record data for a physics lab. Somehow there was a major error that resulted in XP rebooting itself. Now tell me again how this stuff seems to happen to Microsoft haters. I was neutral until the dam computer rebooted itself at the most horrible moment ever.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
In Explorer I frequently run into the problem of when selecting multiple files by holding down the shift key and down, and the selection extends past the edge of the screen, the selection not working right.
Explorer doesn't do smooth scrolling, so the end of the filename is always off the side of the window in most views.
The start bar complains that there is not enough room when you make fonts large, even though there is plenty of screen real estate.
Dialogs don't resize properly with large fonts.
If I put more thought and time to it, I could come up with plenty more.
If Windows 95 and 98 were such successes, why were they so buggy? ;)
How about KOffice as alternative? Is there any comparison between OpenOffice and KOffice published? When I looked into the OpenOffice code a while ago I was discouraged by the original StarOffice code and the amount of Java code. I guess Sun added the Java code, thanks, but no thanks. As far as I can tell there is at least no Java dependence in KOffice. It would be nice to compare two comparable OpenSource projects directly instead of making general statements based on just one example.
If you want software based on open source then you use Star Office, this has been packaged and tested, it is also supported.
Basically you can't complain about open source if you've not paid anything for it. If someone gives me a free meal I'm not going to complain, if I pay for one and it sucks I will.
Anyway, Open Office 3.1? 2 has only just been released.
Why can't these people whine before the release date, submit the bugs and get them fixed instead of slating all the hard work people are doing for free?
I don't have too many problems with Windows either, but MS Office drives me insane. Word is fine for writing letters, and while many people use it for more sophisticated stuff, it has too many show-stopping bugs for us.
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.
A lot of the apparent sucess stories of open source are applications that were donated in a fairly complete form. eg. The Mozilla code based came from netscape after the finish of the first browser wars. The code base had been terribly abused by netscape in an attempt to add features too quickly. Really, The code base for mozilla and openoffice should have been thrown out and started again. But that takes time and the new versions wanted have all the features of the old version at least for a few years, so nobody would use them.
It's not an issue with the open source model, it's an issue with the large amount of work involved in dealling with a terribly overly complicated original code base.
- Jesse McNelis
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Can someone post a link or a torrent for this useful-sounding file? Better yet, maybe you could email it to me....
Disclaimer: I use OpenOffice daily. I use Writer, Calc, Base and on occasion Impress.
I have found a few bugs/missing features I would like to have. For example:
-in Impress, so far there is no way to embed sound or other multimedia files. In PowerPoint I used to do this. I would like to be able to have a music file play while the slides autoadvance. I can do the second part easily, but I can't get sound to play. I also have not yet been able to embed a short film clip on a slide.
-in Writer/Calc/Base there is no easy way to print mailing labels from either a spreadsheet or database mailing list. The help files give a method to do it, but when the method is followed only the first page is formatted making it necessary to repeat the process several times if multipale pages of labels are needed, such as for a large database.
-Impress tends to crash often for me during formatting/creation when my slides have a lot of photos (like if I want to make a slideshow of jpgs/pngs/etc.)
There might be more, those are off of the top of my head less than two minutes after reading the OP and link.
Disclaimer #2: I use Linux exclusively (Ubuntu) because I want to--not because I hate any particular OS or company. I have other very effective methods of producing the mailing labels I need, but I would like a good presentation program...Impress is almost there.
Along with this goes the mentality that "the bigger the company, the better the results." Accenture just got shot down by the state of Colorado after $1.5 million had already been spent on a voter registration system that was obviously not going work as required. The contract was for $10 million.
I use Windows because it supports every computer game I want to play. I very rarely have stability issues. I don't doubt that other OS's are more stable, but they don't support all the games I might like to play (especially older games).
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.
Doesn't come up then. First click doesn't come through. Sometimes second click doesn't. On rare occasions third click doesnt. Fourth click always seems to.
-everphilski-
Well... that seems like a simple enough interface function, right? Selecting a menu isn't processor intensive or memory intensive. (at least not from my experiance... I've programmed interfaces mostly in Qt) I don't see why it should miss clicks... thats an obvious flaw from a user perspective. They could at least leave the flaws for the stuff the average joe isn't going to run into.
-everphilski-
Switched to KDE :)
However its a problem thats presented on a few of my coworkers machines (we all run identical development boxes) and I switched to gnome to confirm its existance... with regularity.
-everphilski-
Signing over copyright to Sun is only required if one wants their changes to be distributed by Sun in their OOo. If one is comfortable distributing one's own OOo or if one doesn't want to distribute one's changes, there is no need for signing over a copyright.
I don't use OOo for all that much because my work doesn't call for this kind of program. However I do think OOo Writer would be more useful if it could more easily reformat text into paragraphs—something where you could click a button and watch your document's hard-formatted lines become proper paragraphs if the lines were not separated by two or more line breaks (or restrict this paragraph reformatting to a selection).
Digital Citizen
Fair enough. ;) But please _do_ file a bug report so that it can be tracked down and fixed. I certainly haven't noticed the problem on any of the machines I have used. The only problem I have is that the applications menu can take a few seconds to appear the first time it's opened.
Here's something you might find interesting. A List Apart used CSS to format their book and posted a tutorial http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom
I don't OOo it IS bloated, no really... but I think the open source model is not to be blamed here... I'd rather point to the huge legacy code from StarOffice... take KOffice which started from scratch.. it's not as "advanced" but much more responsive... I just keep openoffice to convert .doc => .odt and edit with Koffice after...
What the world need is not an open source office application that tries to replicate Office, it's a light efficient office suite. For 99% people, there is very little difference between MSWord and Google mail rich edit box...
Font, color, size and that's it!
\u262D = \u5350
... so what ? OpenOffice has come from proprietary world and this has been a long time by now. It's age is the sole reason it has reached Microsoft Office compatibility before other not bloated Office packages (like KOffice, for example). Money from Sun Microsystems is not a big deal here - if there weren't Open Office, big companies would support any other package. OpenOffice popularity is just so unfortunate, so what ? Both now-open-source-former-closed-source software packages are like this - Open Office and Firefox (that is, compare Gecko and KHTML). It's just too bad people keep writing code over and over those stuff. If there were Microsoft Office for Linux, maybe I would buy it just to throw away OO.o.
People who want to find something to bitch about almost always can. He's not convincing me, though, because a year ago my MOM (who is more computer literate than most moms but is not a programmer like most supposed Open Source Users) told me she preferred OOo over MS Word, because it has a much more intuitive interface and is far less buggy. I'm sorry, but nothing any expert says can have more weight than an average user's opinion, and many people have already contradicted this guy.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
The company I work for had to run Corel Office 2002, and even after 4 Service packs it was still more buggy than Open Office 2.0. Don't even get me started with Word 2000. When we rolled it out, there were some large gaping bugs in the application. Whenever a new application gets released it has some problems, but it doesn't take long (usually) to fix the large bugs and release the first Service pack. I guess my point is; to blame Open Source for some bugs in a .0 version release is kind of foolish.
Open source movement ponders that you may be paying much more money than software really costs. Although the phrase "YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR!" is true you may be paying for what you get and for what you don't. This is actually a fallacy of capitalism.
They're not bugs, they're "features". ;-)
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
I'm a GNOME guy. I read Planet GNOME daily; it's my favorite TV channel.
I can't find it for you right now, but here's some things I can find in a handful of minutes:
Honestly, I don't know the history behind it; I just know that there's been a lot of OOo advocacy coming from the GNOME community.
Personally, I'm all for it. But I still like Abiword better..!
If I had the time to work on GNOME, I'd work on documentation and tools to make Bonobo easier to understand and use.
Seriously.
Microsoft Office sucks. Word sucks. Pagination is totally unpredictable across sessions/computers/printouts, the typesetting quality is shit, its default settings are asinine, the formatting is too complicated and is much harder to deal with than WordPerfect "reveal codes." PowerPoint sucks because either it intrinsically leads to moronic presentations or it unleashes the inner moron in its users.
OpenOffice - OOWriter sucks because it is a slow clone of Word. At least it can make PDFs and has acceptable default settings.
Seriously, how much do you need to pamper them with automatic wizards and pretty icons?! Get the bitches to learn Emacs and use it with Auctex to output LaTeX documents (that are letters, articles, reports, books or even slides), with ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) and the R statistical language to handle their spreadsheet needs, and sql.el for their databases. Within a year they'll be emacs crooners.
The bitches; I am sick of this spoilt populace that refuses to be anything but dumb.
Is there software on the moon that is vunerable?
"10001110101 - periodic table with a centerpiece of mind" -Clutch
So using aforementioned reasoning, that proves that giving contracts to companies doesn't work.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Bad code is bad code, whether it is proprietary or open source.
I use Open Office every day to practice law and will never go back to MS Word or WordPerfect.
The notion that most users don't follow Mr. Stallman's lead and fix their own bugs is not a flawed assumption. Many citizens are not as literate or educated as they could be. That's not an argument for illiteracy.
I don't think the fact that I tend to think like a consumer instead of a coder is something to celebrate. Its a reason for me to increase my code literacy.
I'm laughing at clouds.
Alternate (Score:5, Funny) by Hey Pope Felcher . . (921019) on Friday December 09, @08:16PM (#14225426) If Windows is such a success, why is it so buggy?
not to mention all of the insecurities MS Office (including Outlook) are supposed to have (granted most of outlooks are idiots opening attachments that are obviously a virus or spyware),
others are (not exactly bugs, but just crappy programs and services): aol, e-machines, and any others you guys wanna add...
Of course they wanted to charge me $35.00 just to speak to a tech. When I explained the problem, a little bit better, they transferred me around, and they asked me for $600.00 (USD). Needless to say I hung up. I was not paying 600 to report a bug in software that requires a new build to fix. No wonder they never released the Office XP subscription, it had bugs, so they gave it to the retailers instead.
A couple months later when I got Office XP professional with front page, there was no error. Thank you software fairy!
"10001110101 - periodic table with a centerpiece of mind" -Clutch
Most complex software is currently buggy. Licensing has nothing to do with it. However, with open source software, the most amount of money a particular bug can cost me is no more than a few times the cost of hiring people to fix that bug for me. Proprietary software doesn't have that cost limit. Case closed.
http://outcampaign.org/
Had some really bad experience recently with OOo2 when I was writing a term paper which includes a lot of math equations and crossreferences, and OOo crashed quite a few times. I guess I have to take the plunge with LaTeX next time.
Excel is a spreadsheet program. Access is database. think you mixed that one up. Now, may I add my own corolarry?
Corollary: text editors are used mainly by people who don't understand word processors.
complexity isn't always an advantage; there are plenty of things spreedsheets do just fine, and a database program would be overkill for.
No single raindrop believes that it is responsible for the storm.
I think you may be on to something:
As far as I know, in the five years it has been available as open source, not one contribution to the program has come from amateurs.
Only a sith deals in absolutes. (In all seriousness though, where does he get of with this rediculous assumption? Not many? Mabye. None? Ha!)
No single raindrop believes that it is responsible for the storm.
without first verifying that openoffice has more bugs than windows. I think we should count them.
Fingers *and* toes people.. ready?
I know it's an easy answer, but really. Don't like it? Don't use it. Only tech columnists with huge egos (or kids with lots of time) think Open Source projects are there to declare war on Microsoft. Open Office is what it is, and it's been getting a lot better all the time, and personally I use 2.0 and never had the slight problem with it, and it's being used by millions worldwide. That's all there is to it.
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!
Because it's not a Microsoft product?
Blame the user, not the software.
Not being able to install and run malware should not be because it's inconvenient to install and run any software.
That's sort of thing is fine for servers, but for there to be a Desktop Linux, you'd need this. Otherwise it's too hard for normal users.
A good design would make it hard for any software to screw up your system beyond easy recovery, and easy for a user to do things that way.
A DRM design would make it hard for you to install nonapproved software.
There are tons of people writing stuff for MS Windows, and it is usually easy to get their stuff to work on the various versions of MS Windows.
Whereas on Linux it's hard for people to distribute a single set of binaries that runs on different distros, or even just different versions of a distro. Compile from source? Yeah right, as if Aunt May would do that. Even if you make compiling etc a one click installer, compiling from source takes a fair bit of time and requires more dependencies (which take time to load and build even automatically, and bring in issues of their own).
So much so that it seems many people delegate to their chosen distro the task of repackaging 3rd party software so that they can install and use it without the risk of breaking other stuff, or just not working. So any software that is not supported/listed by the distro is not installed.
While this situation is not as bad as DRM, it is not that dissimilar is it? Only an "elite" group can install nondistro software, ends up quite similar to only an elite group can install non-DRM-approved software (which will be the case with DRM stuff).
In contrast with Windows (preDRM), you can usually try to execute a binary and it WILL run, even if it was made years ago in the days of dos or win 3.1.
Sure that backward compatibility makes it easy for the malware authors. But that also makes it easy in other ways.
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.
Most software I have used is buggy and WIndows is no exception. Sure it has gotten better (they finally fixed the printf("\t\t\b\b\b\b crash me!") bug). Heck I can tell you of at least one bug in Server 2003 that I reported before it shipped and Microsoft refused to even document it (has to do with obscure situations, third party development environments, and differences in environment variable handling between versions).
The thing is every software program has bugs or at least has had bugs. Maybe metafont might be bug free but that is about the only thing I can think of. Mostly Windows bugs go through phases. Right now, IE (integrated with the user-mode OS libraries) seems to be having its share of bugs/security problems. Who knows what will be next.
Just my $0.02
BTW one point in the article is that part of the issues with OpenOffice is that it makes it difficult to get contributions from community members. Basically, because of the fact that you essentially have to give your IP to Sun (so they can use it in StarOffice), you reduce the potential contribution pool.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Insert -> Movie and Sound.
Quite easy, isn't it? If the format is unknown, then do the following (from the OOo help system): "On UNIX systems, the Media Player requires the Java Media Framework API (JMF). Download and install the JMF files, and add the path to the installed jmf.jar to the class path in Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - Java."
HTH!
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
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.
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.
Can you give a list of steps to reproduce? I have never observed what you claim.
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.'
saddly.. after I type up a paper in OpenOffice I open it in word because it misses a lot of errors like extra spaces between words (I should know better). Anyhow.. I downloaded the source just because I was interested and the thing is huge and hard to follow.. the entire code needs to be re-designed IMO Then again.. I've never worked on a large project like that.. so what do I know
I'm not sure on that - I was merely suggesting that there is a lot of faulty reasoning that in one way or another, contributes to the negative outcome of software projects.
My only complaint, and the complaint of many others is with usability. Sure it's stable, but that doesn't matter if you can't do what you want to do. The other problem that was pointed out by an earlier poster is that OO.o doesn't really do anything better. They follow microsoft around trying to copy a piece of software that is lame by definition.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
...is using a piece of software primarily backed by Sun Microsystems as a benchmark of what's good. :)
Open Office Calc (Actually NeoOffice) pisses me off becaus it is so slow on my 6mo iBook, at least to open up files do a quick sort and quick visualisation of the data in my csv file.
Usually when I need to do stuff with data, I write a short perl script, or use a real stats package (either GNU R, or SPSS - site licence), or sometimes a quick shell script (or more often perl backticks).
`sort|uniq -c | ./magic.pl > out.csv || R || sh doit.txt ` kind of thing. It was bad enough recently that I thought about s/purchasing/pirating/; a copy of M$ Office, but it wasn't that bad, and wasn't about to save me the price of Office with the purchase either (but that's because my client is ripping me off which is another story)...
And OO.o users have a disadvantage in that they don't generally have the resources that the we've-bought-gilded-shite-but-have-to-support-it-b ecause-it's-mission critical set have.
OK end of rant.
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
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.
And there are many legitimate situations on which to show a short clip, for example in education. Nothing augments a presented experiment more than the lecturer in his youth with long hair and beard, stumbling around in a small lab.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
If they work with OO.o it won't be because they don't want to pay for support. It will be because none of them is able to develop a sufficiently mature office suite that can take on MS office independently. This is both because they don't have the (or will to assign the) resources and because if they competed they would be competing both against MS office and against each other.
And I don't see how this is the failure of "open source." Big and little entities are allowed to contribute to open projects. It only becomes a failure of open source the products never got developed people people were always vying for control.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Large usage? Look at the facts of sloccount:
Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
cpp: 4630794 (88.89)
java: 361396 (6.94)
ansic: 130206 (2.50)
About 7 percent is not "large usage"
The real moral of the story is, NEVER use a "fully featured" word processor to write a book. Also, do not perform brain surgery with scissors, and do not write real time applications in visual basic. Avoid KWord (a fine page layout program), Word, OO, Abiword and all the rest.
Use one of the following:
For lots of document structure, footnotes and headers and so on, and good typesetting, use Lyx. Or TeXmacs. Or Kile for the really hard core. But Lyx and Texmacs are both very easy to use at a restricted level, if you avoid trying to write LaTex code and accept their templates.
For getting words down on paper fast, use a text editor, of which Kate will be found best in Linux because of the ease of use, good looks, split views, and project aspects. But there are hundreds of others.
For fleshing out your ideas and moving sections around, use a tree type outliner: TreePad, Kjots, Gjots, Tuxcards, or Doug Bell's very capable TreeLine. Or a real outliner. More for the older Mac, or Leo. Leo is the real thing.
No-one who moves from a WP to Lyx or TeXmacs for book writing will ever go back.
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..."
Good for you! Wait, why do I care?
because someone who cares so little for the future of the planet that he'd leave a range of electrical appliances on 24/7 for weeks on end is apparently trying to teach them something about ethics and technology. Seriously, unless you are running a server or something, try hitting the "off" key now and again.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
The people who use an office suite to write scientific papers are the same sorts of people who use Windows anyway. Linux-using scientists almost exclusively use LaTeX, either directly, or through a semi-WYSIWG frontend like LyX.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.)
I'm using Firefox right now (on Windows XP), and I can tell you, it's a piece of shit.
Or explain to me why a web browser with 4 pages open needs to eat up 90~100MB of memory? Out of 256.
Don't say "if you were using Linux Firefox would blah blah blah".
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Visibility and Cross Platform support.
Yes there are better office suites available for some tasks that are already free, and most importantly they are all going to support the same formats. OO gave the one advantage of massive corporate backing which has opened the door to the concept that maybe being tied into MS Office is a bad idea and that the file format should be openly available for anyone to work with.
37 - what does it stand for really...
Hi
quite often I cut & past from a browser to OOWriter, in order to print the site quite better.
The problem is that if the site contains images, that are linked (not embedded), so when I go offline, I loose all that pictures.
Somebody can help me?
And while I love my Seamonkey and have firefox for my boys and keep portable firefox on my flash could someone PLEASE make them less resource piggy?There has got to be a way to make Firefox and Seamonkey not suck up all the RAM after a couple of hours of use.If they could only fix that one extremely irritating problem they would have the perfect browsers.As it is I'll just have to keep restarting them ever couple of hours due to my extension addiction keeping me from switching to Opera.Long live the Seamonkey and the Fox!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
in all the past OpenSource topics everybody was using OpenOffice as the example of good OpenSource use. Now is seems that " OpenOffice isn't OpenSource" , "It was closed source until x years ago" .
If OpenOffice was your girlfriend you would have been dumped by now people.
-- TRUST ME! I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!
Just kidding...though I'm not sure how Firefox on your OS eats up so much memory.
Right now, I've got 4 tabs open on Firefox 1.5 on Win2K Pro, and it only gobbles up 43MB.
Click on any of the menus. Any of them. Applications/Computer/Whatever the third one is. Fedora core 4, complete install. 1 in 2 chance your first click won't go thru. 1 in 2 chance your secnod click won't go thru... rare put possible chance your third click won't go through.
-everphilski-
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.
Why I use open source has nothing to do with levels of support, number of bugs, percieved speed compared to windows, etc. I believe in free speech, and I liken programming to speech, hence it should be free (as in speech). The only way it can be free in that way is to have the code open for the rest of us to have a look, and change if neccessary. I don't give a flying sheep about *nix "trying to take over the desktop". It works for me, and I prefer it to windows, mainly because I can make it do what I want, without resorting to buying third party software for stupidly insignificant functions. I hope linux doesn't become the predominant desktop for pc users, because all the "no sense - no feeling" users will expect everything done for them, and that is directly at odds with the idea of a *nix OS.
Let's face it, most of the /. community are, if not actual scientists, scientifically minded. We are the top 5% intellectually, and we like to tinker. If there are others out there who like the idea of tinkering with the OS, then they will learn it for themselves. Remember, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
As long as they (govt.) don't legislate "free" software out of existence, then I'm happy to be in the minority.
well why is windows buggy. large softwhere running on thousands on pc almost all with diffret hardware etc couses bugs. or even a dev messing up. this happons on both closed and open softwhere. why is linux a bit worse then windows is linux doesent have the backing of every vender out there we the communaty have to make everthing linux. yes thers a few commercal companys helping but a mutch less number then m$. linux is getting better everyday relly i mean a distro like suse simply works most of the time. but i did have a few issues with it and some stuff is just so stupid its not funny. for 1 my mouse doesent work under any linux at this time a glitch in the 2.6 kernel with ps2 optical mice something is waked out in the int and kills the mouse led. probly a driver issue but come on its a walmart 10$ optical mosue knothing special abought it. another glitch was in yast. i have a ati 7000 witch has always been a problem under linux it workes n the latest xorg and 2.6 kernel but yast refused to auto configure it i had to do it myself using the xorgconfig and edting the config to enable its 3d rendering. stuff like this is what slows oss down. im not dissing them i mean im shure it will be fixed and i still run suse even without a mouse but sence a simple mouse whont work it doesent make me wanna remove windows.
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...
Yeah, what ever, I think I can almost hear RMS screaming in the background! While we are on the subject of RMS: commercial does not equal proprietary Red Hat and Fedora are commercial as is OOo because they are developed by business (Red Hat and Sun) but they are also OSS.
IMO a lot of this article is flawed. Just because there have been 50000 bug reports doesn't mean there are 50000 bugs. Firefox has more bug reports than that doesn't mean IE is better. Maybe OOo isn't perfect but ist only v.2 and made a huge jump from 1 to get there.
The worst problem open office has IMHO is that it tries to poorly replicate the thousands useless features msoffice offers instead of doing what open source is good at: innovating, inventing new ways of doing things.
Netscape lost while trying to compete with ie feature-wise, firefox wins offering you a "lean and mean browsing machine" where you can plug any exentesion you want.
I wish yhe open source community tried to build an office suite geared towards simplicity and expandability, not just as bloated and buggy as its competitor...
It's a "commercial product gone open".
For an Open Source product to have thriving success, it needs to be BORN open. Take firefox, for example. Even when Netscape opened its source, it had to be rewritten from scratch to fix most of the rendering bugs (massively nested tables, anyone?).
In other words, a definition I would like of Open Source Software is that it's created bottom-up. The author plants a then other people come and make it grow.
Having ONLY ONE AUTHOR would be the same as a closed-source product. What use is having the sourcecode available if nobody reads and modifies it?
Also, the program must be well-designed by its original author. Writing a program with a buggy and limited infrastructure will need to be refactored sooner or later. Multi-tier design (even in non-database apps) is a requisite.
So, if one open source program isn't designed to be configurable (hardwired values, non-unicode strings in wxWidgets), extensible (no support for modularization), it will be very difficult to overcome its limitations.
The Open Source isn't a panacea. It's a field where programs evolve (like genetic algorithms). Good programs survive, bad programs get often forgotten.
But Open Source itself does NOT guarantee a program to be bug-free. It just facilitates the conditions so the bugs can be fixed soon.
So if OpenOffice has serious bugs, don't blame the Open Source model. And yes, I don't like OpenOffice very much, as a longtime MS user, I find some of the interfaces kinda "alien" (but I manage to survive without MS Office installed, and that's a very good thing), and to my frustration i had tried OpenOffice when it still was version 1 (about 5 years ago). eew. >_<
Perhaps the purported bugginess of Open Office is related to its closed-source heritage.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
When open-source projects deal with infrastructure stuff (protocols, etc) or system programming (kernel, shells), than you have a big pool of knowledgeable programmers to draw upon.
Now, some software is much more specialized. Word processors and spreadsheets are one case. A much worse case is stuff dealing with multimedia, in which case you won't be able to even understanding the algorithms unless you're acquainted with topics that require mathematics at least at the level of an engineering degree.
So, yeah, some stuff is not going to get that many eyeballs. What I think is unfortunate, however, is how little universities in general are interested in working on existing software projects. Two particular projects I'm thinking about when I mention this are the computer algebra systems that were commercial products and that were open-sourced, Maxima (ex-Department of Energy) and Axiom (ex-IBM Thomas Watson Research Center and NAG, too - I think).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
If you want to make a general point, you need to pick a typical case, not an extreme case. Is the open source model flawed? Yes, of course it is! The alternative claim would be that it is completely perfect. Is the commercial model flawed? Yes, profoundly so. Of course, if the goal in software development is to make money then the commercial model is a more natural choice. If the goal is to develop quality software, then this article makes especially misleading arguments that call this guy's experience and insight into question (even given that he's a hardcore user of at least one open source project).
My main gripe is that this guy has picked the best possible case to make his points: a project that is currently open source, but has inherited a lot of messy code. OpenOffice is probably five standard deviations more complex than the average open source project. It's also extremely immature compared to its commercial competitor. If you pick the worst imaginable case for open source, then obviously it has problems compared to commercial software. This author is either only familiar with a small number of atypical cases or has intentionally tried to argue from an atypical case that supports his argument.
That said, here is one feature OpenOffice has that Microsoft Office can't come close to matching and never will. OpenOffice runs on Linux. Since Linux is the operating system I have to use for my work, from my point of view this is a fatal limitation of the commercial software model. Again, we know which model makes money faster. But from my point of view, the commercial model produces software that is fatally flawed with no possibility whatsoever of remediation. OpenOffice has other advantages, and many other disadvantages. To me, it's pretty obvious that OpenOffice is still improving rapidly, while in my view MS Word has only gotten better at revenue generation.
I totally agree with the parent, and think that Brown's critique are to take into account.
The worst problem open office has IMHO is that it tries to poorly replicate the thousands useless features msoffice offers instead of doing what open source is good at: innovating, inventing new ways of doing things.
Netscape lost while trying to compete with ie feature-wise, firefox wins offering us a "lean and mean browsing machine" where you can plug any exentesion you want (but only if _you_ want).
I wish yhe open source community tried to build an office suite geared towards simplicity and expandability, not just as bloated and buggy as its competitor...
I originally submitted this article... myself, I think that Andrew Brown is on to something but his understanding of big corporations and open source is 180 degrees off course. Here's my rebuttal: "How to Improve OpenOffice's Blood Supply" along with a suggestion of how micropayments can improve the sluggish circulation of big FOSS projects.
Current RH tech does it. Install RHEL4 (or a rebuild) and click an rpm in Firefox. For example, go to ATI and download their driver as an rpm. Watch Firefox invoke the mime handler for .rpm files, which is system-config-packages. See it prompt for the root password and proceed to install with no additional fuss. It can be done, and increasingly IS done. Yet one more myth about "linux will never be as easy as Windows" busted.
Democrat delenda est
What you describe would be perfect...except that I don't have that menu option at all.
I am using OOo2.0, not a beta (I used betas from 1.9.79 to 1.9.129). I have the latest java jre installed (Sun Blackdown - Linux team 1.4.2-02) and it is set up properly in Tools->Options->Java
I wonder what I am doing wrong?
I also followed your link and was successful in installing the JMF files in the appropriate directory. I modified the instructions from setenv, which is csh, to use export since I use bash and set the variables as instructed, but I couldn't get the diagnostics applet to confirm the installation. This is probably moot since the menu item I mentioned previously doesn't exist on my installation of OOo, but I must be doing something wrong...
I truly appreciate the hints and I'll keep looking at it...looks like I'm off to visit some tech forums.
OpenOffice is, of course, still under much development. Have you tried debugging to see why this happens? Have you filed a big report? People aught to so this so that OpenOffice (among other's) can actually be improved! Yes. And I have discussed this in the appropriate newsgroups. Also, if you're only making a slideshow of jpgs/pngs/etc., why not use one of the other apps in Ubuntu for this like gThumb or F-Spot? In each of these cases it is not a matter of a lack of alternate methods. I could do the slideshow multiple ways and have it work. I just wanted to point out, in support of the OP, another example. I would love to see OpenOffice be all it can be as well because for those who are not *nix savvy (and don't want/can't become so) it would be beneficial for them to have this working. That's all I was thinking.
Sorry...this time with carriage returns...
OpenOffice is, of course, still under much development. Have you tried debugging to see why this happens? Have you filed a big report? People aught to so this so that OpenOffice (among other's) can actually be improved!
Yes. And I have discussed this in the appropriate newsgroups.
Also, if you're only making a slideshow of jpgs/pngs/etc., why not use one of the other apps in Ubuntu for this like gThumb or F-Spot?
In each of these cases it is not a matter of a lack of alternate methods. I could do the slideshow multiple ways and have it work. I just wanted to point out, in support of the OP, another example. I would love to see OpenOffice be all it can be as well because for those who are not *nix savvy (and don't want/can't become so) it would be beneficial for them to have this working. That's all I was thinking.
They don't offer support?
/. story submitters are not contributing to FUD.
That's news to me!
http://support.openoffice.org/index.html
I'm so glad that
You can most certainly get support for OpenOffice from the primary sponsor of OpenOffice.org (Sun Microsoystems) as well as for the commercial product, StarOffice.
OpenOffice.org has come a long way. In fact if they clean up the I/O and fix the related I/O performance bottlenecks I plan to buy StarOffice as an upgrade to OpenOffice for all of my users next year. We've already switched most of our users from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice and have lost little to no functionality (and have gained some functionality in some ways).
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Worked for me I'm afraid (I.e. no bug) - I've tried slackware, ubuntu and debian sarge. I have no access to FC4, but perhaps this indicates a bug in FC4 rather than Gnome? Write a bug report.
For some reason, OpenOffice segmentation faults on me about 90% of the time when I close it running on 32-bit SuSE 10.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
...is that, as you say, '...the WordPerfect DOC importer is very good and has been forever...' Well... It's ok. First of all, OOo hasn't been around 'forever' - and StarOffice was never very capable at opening .DOCs. Secondly, WP's handling of .DOC falls apart when you try maintaining table information (much like OOo 1.0's handling of same).
Now I know plenty of lawyers and doctors who still use WP because of it's extended dictionaries for their fields. But that doesn't mean it 'outsells' OOo, it just means these folks haven't had a reason to change over.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Hmmmm. I use OOo version 2.0 as well. You may alternatively try Insert -> Object -> Video... . In Tools -> Options..., have you activated the "Show inactive menu items" under OpenOffice.org - View? Maybe it isn't enabled somehow in your build.
Both of those were great suggestions. I have "Show inactive menu items" activated. Under Insert->Object the choices I have available are: OLE Object..., Plug-in..., Applet..., Formula... Just those four. I recall seeing the options you and the other poster mention in earlier beta versions, but I was never able to get them to actually embed anything. They would insert a placeholder graphic, but that was all. Those options don't exist in my installation now, though. Hmm..
Thanks for the ideas! I appreciate it.
It's late, but I'll bite: a couple problems I have with my limited use of Office 2003:
1) MS Access cannot *access* Microsoft Foxpro *.dbf files! (In a manner that I've found - works quite easily in the '97 version on same machine.)
Access 2003 does access dBIII files, so using an editor to change the first byte of the file from x03 to x30 (or reverse) makes the file accessable as a dBIII. But forget Foxpro support.
2) Haven't been able to use Access 2003 to connect to mySQL server with ODBC, unlike the simple '97 methond. I'm sure it's do-able, but I can't spend any further time on that project, so it's abandonded 'til whatever.
Just two things I can think of that made me say, "I told you so," when they decided new clients would beat down the doors once we upgraded from '97, since _everyone_ upgraded already.
PS It made my registry spontaneously combuse! M$ suxxors!
Yeah, planes are big and complex as was the Apollo XI launcher, but nobody would accept that sort of feeble argument as a defence. Buggy is bad, period. Microsoft are starting to realise that, but open-source heads still reckon it's kinda cool to be imperfect...Cut the crap and get professional
OK so I'm sure this has been said a few hundred times already but... how do bugs make OpenOffice any different than Microsoft Office?? Has this guy used MS Office lately??
.doc for 2003 and it works great in Word 2003.
Just Friday(12-9) AT WORK. I used Open Office to write a part of a testing plan document because of a very lame BUG in WORD 2003.
For those intersted, bug details:
Word, when changing the font for a numbered list was DELETING THE NUMBERING. Quite irritating. Open Office 2.0 of course had no such issue. Additonally I was able to save the fixed document as a
Word defense:
Now in the defense of Word I'm sure there was a work around... However, this is not the only annoying odd functionality I've run into. How long has Word existed? How long has Open Office existed??
Summary:
I would dare say this goes the otherway as well: Why is MS Office so successful when its still as buggy as it is. I might also add, Why is MS Word so successful when everyone I have ever talked to who used WordPerfect before Word was on the scene, still misses Wordperfect?!?
You can download and use the individual suite components independently. I only have Writer installed at the office, because it's all I use. It's fast fast fast, because it's not loading up all the other components.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Okay, everyone's already hacked the "not exactly open source" point to ribbons, so taking that as a gimme, let's move on.
Gaim vs. ICQ. I started using ICQ in '96 or '97, and it was a pretty good little program. There is no longer anything pretty, good, or little about it, nor has there been for many years.
Gaim is svelte as hell. Faster than greased duck shit. Leaves zero footprint. Does it all. And, from all indications, has not peaked.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
He also said "If the content consists of sound and motion, show sound and motion." I think what's important is to choose the presentation medium or media to fit the content, not the other way round,. That means not using programs like Powerpoint by default, but not eschewing them completely.
Yeah, sure, MS Office looks nice. I'll give you that much. And that's why we make our office apps look like it.
But, as nice as it looks, MS Office doesn't work very well - and that's where the open-source office suites come into play.
www.linuxpenguin.net
There are plenty of things that spreadsheets do very well, that chossing a database for would simply be a "0.o WTF !?" moment.
sounds like a two piece custom pool cue... (niether here nor there)
but Dan Qua[y]le still invented the [I]nternet right?
No, but he did assemble Al Gore from balsa wood as a science fair project. (Al was adopted by the Gore family when the elder senator found him as part of a National Science Fair display in the Capitol Rotunda. Walt Disney put the senator in contact with a cricket who knew a puppet maker in exchange for the movie rights. The rest is history.)
Better known for his work with potatos, Senator Quayle has since given up working in balsa.
Free Adam Smith! (Or best offer.)
In the first third of the article, Brown very deliberately chooses his broadest brush to paint all open source software with his perceptions of the shortcomings of Open Office. As you yourself pointed out, nwbvt, most people don't end up reading the entire article. I did read the whole article, but I didn't let the reasonable tone of the end blind me to the demagoguery at the front.
I had forgotten how much cooler teenagers look when they are smoking. Oh, wait
Office 2003 and VS 2005 both required reboots for me.
I also find it very hard to believe the kernel would crash if you did rm -rf on a *nix box. And as another poster has said, the file-protection NT offers is a mixed-blessing. Generally I find it tedious because it bites often (trying to move an open file), but I've never once recognised a time it has saved my bottom.
So in conclustion I say FUD to your post. You may believe your own FUD but it is FUD none-the-less.
In the first third of the article he is talking specifically about Open Office. He is using it as an example to refute the idea that "Many eyes make bugs shallow" (and to refute a statement like that, you really only need one example) but he certainly is not saying all open source software is buggy. You interpreted it the way you did because you want to feel angry at him for pointing out the limitations of what open source can do.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Doesn't anyone remember how buggy MS office was when it was the same age as open office? Very buggy, with few features. I believe all office suites have loads of bugs.
don't spit into the wind, don't tug on supermans cape, don't pull the mask of the 'ol lone rager and don't mess around with jim/re:vamap slim>>> even if you do have a two piece cutom pool cue... cute song from the sixties that sort of reminded me of your name and what your're trying to imply by using it........ and since you do apply a lot of non-sense in what you are saying most of the time, i kind of tried to size it up as something .. a two piece custom pool cue...! too much ranting and raving by " coward anonymous" and really
too much swearing and flaming... no harm intended (really). but most of the time you just seem to go on a rant and
no quit till half the thread thinks otherwise... look at the moderator faq and tell me why coward anonymous has
no karma (its obvious?!) yeah its too damn obvious no pun intended..