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.'"

Comments

Alternate

[Hey Pope Felcher . .]

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.

Re:Alternate

[d34thm0nk3y]

No kidding, what a flamebait article too. I could only find reference to two actual bugs in the article: notes (or comments, as Word users call them) don't have word wrap; and spaces typed at the end of a line won't show.

The rest is some rant about OS people saying users can submit bug patches but hardly anybody does.

Re:Alternate

[external400kdiskette]

If Windows is such a success, why is it so buggy?

Maybe because it's not so buggy? Whilst nothing will be bug free it's kinda moronic to see the same bullshit modded +5 funny day in day out along with the BSOD jokes in 2005 and clippy jokes. They really aren't funny to the majority of people who will find the current MS OS stuff to be pretty stable assuming their not stupid enough to open freesex.exe and whatever else. Cue for someone to tell me their stories about spontaneously combusing registries that always seem to happen to MS haters.

Re:Alternate

[dancpsu]

I think it's interesting that aside from the complaint that OOo is slow and bloated (possibly from being a Windows/UNIX hybrid), the only two complaints are:

1) no word wrap in comment boxes
2) spaces don't show up at the end of a line

Number 2 I see often in word processors in order to perform word wrap properly, so I'm not sure what he's talking about. Number 1 seems minor in comparison to the enormous bugs in Office on things as simple as page numbering and wrapping text around a picture.

Also, he doesn't consider that the restrictions on OOo code may be keeping some programmers away since they have to sign everything over to Sun.

Also, to be fair, an office suite is a giant, unweildy, unUNIXy type of program. Digging through the monsterous codebase is a high barrier to fixing a bug that may just be a minor annoyance. An office suite would have to be broken into much smaller parts in order to encourage more people to develop the software.

Re:Alternate

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I see no reason why a word processor (ignoring the other suite components) could not be made as a mozilla-based app. The rendering of pretty text is there, and Firefox's CSS is so nice we get everything we need now. Even columns, just recently. Doubt you'd need to write new XPCOM for it. (maybe only for importing msword, even pdf export will be possible with cairo)

The big question is, if we can easily and quickly make a world class word processor, how do we make it? Do we mindlessly ape Word down to the last little toolbar button placement? How do we make it sensible, instead of doing only what has been done before?

I am working on just such a project myself. Finally have it using data URIs for embedded pictures/objects. Formatting is still wonky. Splitting paragraphs across a page still doesn't work right either. Unlike OOo though, mine outputs plain XHTML files, can be opened up in notepad. No zip archives of a thousand file components (sorry, but I do not like binary formats).

Re:Alternate

[Jace of Fuse!]

Cue for someone to tell me their stories about spontaneously combusing registries that always seem to happen to MS haters.

Here goes!

Okay, so one day I was using my PC, right? Needless to say it runs Windows, because all serious computer users use Windows. Microsoft has a monopoly and we have no choices. You can't buy a good alternative, so you might as well just give up the idea of downloading one for free!

Anyway I was sitting on my ass, browsing for porn, eating pizza, smoking cigarettes, and drinking beer like any good computer geek when suddenly I smelt something burning. No, it wasn't a cigarette that I hadn't put out. It was something worse. MUCH worse! What I smelled was the unmistakable scent of a burning REGISTRY!

That's right! My REGISTRY had caught on fire! As with all major Windows problems, I immediate ran to the one fool proof solution. I hit my ever useful Windows key, brought up the start menu, then moved my mouse mouse pointer over to Shut Down because what I needed a RESTART, and FAST! That always solves everything!

But before I could select Shut Down, some obnoxious program stole focus. It's this program you may have heard of, called Outlook Express! I had a new e-mail! Clearly in the preview pane I could see an e-mail with an attachment, but before I could do anything my antivirus software popped up a warning telling me that my registration had expired and if I wanted to protect my system I needed to pay $49.95!

I felt my mouth go dry and my stomach sink, I knew what this meant! I needed to run an antispyware program! Unfortunately I was unable to do anything at this point because I bought my system at Wal-Mart and the hard drive was grinding away trying to respond! It was so obvious that my system was not going to respond that my Window even said "NOT RESPONDING!"

Then it happened. Windows asked me if I wanted to report a bug. I thought "that's very thoughtful of them, I'm sure Microsoft will get right on with fixing my problem" but before I could send the bug report the screen when blue and filled with a really cryptic message.

I had been through this a dozen times, and knew at this point the reset button was the only remaining option. As I reached for the system it just exploded. Bits of plastic were thrown everywhere, and one even got stuck in my eye.

So that's why I tell people we need band together and search for some kind of alternative. Something different, free, stable, or all of those things. Tell everyone you know. Microsoft really suck, and I only have one eye to prove it!

Was that what you had in mind?

Re:Alternate

[paving-slab]

Or it could just mean he is an unusual ignorant Microsoft-bribed hack...

Re:Alternate

[fermion]

The real discussion should be the reletive maturity of the two products. After 20 years of coherent design, under the direction of consistent upper management, MS Windows and Word should be a stable productive product. Even after 10 years it should have been a good product, but many of us remember the clunky hack job it was. Even in 2000, with ME, and in 97 with MS Word, the quality was far below what one could have reasonable expected.

Now, compare this to codebase for OpenOffice, which while almost as old as a product as MS Word, was purchased by sun about six years ago, and only has been open sourced for 5. Factor in the time for new management, new developers, and new priorities, and MS Word has a significant advantage. The advantage for MS Windows over Linux is even greater. This is not even counting the massive resources that MS can throw at a project. Just look at XBox. In fact comparing Linux to MS Windows is like comparing MS Windows to Mac OS. In both cases one has a latecomer to the market compared to a forerunner.

For the record I used MS Word on many platforms up to a few years ago. I moved to openoffice.org because the feature set was complete enough, and was reliable enough. Continuing to use MS Office was not even worth the minimal cost of an educational license. I don't find it any less reliable than Office, and certainly has no problem opening up the Word files I recieve. In education one regualarly recieves word files from many different versions, as many people use older machines.

Re:Alternate

[hahiss]

I don't want to feed the trolls here, but let me just say this:

When I teach a section in my ethics classes about Free Software, my students (virtually all of whom use windows) are astonished when I tell them that my computers (1 GNU/Linux laptop, 1 FreeBSD desktop) only get rebooted when I update the kernel. They are convinced that rebooting every few days is necessary for, e.g., memory management.

Even if BSODs are ``so last year," the fact is that Windows is poorly designed and poorly executed to the point of fostering bad habits and very low expectations in its users. So, suckitude is this year's BSOD.

Re:Alternate

[One Childish N00b]

Maybe because it's not so buggy?

Ermmm... correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Windows' success based on Window 95/98, which were both buggy POS's (except for 98SE)? The GP poster has a point when you consider Microsoft built up an monopoly on the basis of a bug-ridden often-unstable OS.

(Posted from a Win2000 system with an uptime in the months - I accept you have a point, but Windows' success came *before* the stability of the 2000/XP editions).

Re:Alternate

[Anonymous Coward]

The kernel is probably the single best example of open source software working. It's also sexy as hell to work on and relatively small, thus clearing two of the major barriers to getting people to work on it.

A project like OO is huge, and a lot of the work that really needs to be done is boring as hell, not visible, completely unsexy and thankless. Doing maintenance work or squashing a bug that nobody will ever thank you for is just not going to attract developers. So the bugs remain while the features march on, and all the while the product becomes more and more bloated and unusable.

You can see the same pattern elsewhere - look at Kdevelop. Great, great development environment. Infested with piddly little bugs. Small stuff, like it won't save settings reliably, or it crashes with XIM, or whatever - but the environment has every feature you could ask for, and more are on the way!

Is that a condemnation of OSS? Nope, but it's something that the community has got to deal with - as the article points out - and probably sooner rather than later. How that happens, I do not know, because even in companies that are paying people to write code, it's rare to find someone who actually wants to get in there and do the grunt work when there are sexy new features to work on.

Re:Alternate

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, though, it's actually quite stable as long as some gullible schmuck isn't using it.

Bullshit. I'm down with the message that windows has gotten better, but saying IE is stable is bullshit. My wife and I have run a comparison... IE just pukes about as often as Konqueror does, which is approximately every 4 hours of serious use. Then there is the spyware issue. You shouldn't have to be paranoid in order to use a web browser without fear of it fscking your system, but if you are anything but with IE, you're just asking for trouble.

As for Windows XP stability... Yeah, it's great. Follow this rule: Don't install any software and just use windows and office apps and everything will be fine. Start loading it up with all that great software that won't run under Linux, and it's only a matter of time before you'll be playing the registry restore game... or worse.

But it has gotten better. It just, when it comes to home users, it isn't where it needs to be. The biggest problem is XP still encourages users to run with Admin privileges. As long as users are doing that, it's an accident waiting to happen. While this is true of all modern operating systems, that it is dangerous to run with Admin privileges, XP seems to encourage it out of the box for the home user. That really needs to change. And the system needs to be engineered to be protected from third party apps destabilizing it.

I would like to see XP deal with admin privileges the way Suse does... When something needs to be an Administrator, just prompt for the admin password. Having to log out and login as another user is big PITA and a block to home users not running with admin privileges.

If XP can do this already, I haven't seen how, so please correct me if it can as that would help a few of my home customers.

Re:Alternate

[Nadsat]

I use open office. Been using it for 3 years. It still doesn't work as good as MS office. There are quirky things with it.

The spell checker essentially receives a D+. After I'm done writing a few dozen page paper, I have to paste it into MS office for because Open Office misses too much.

Firfox, for example, is receiving great press because it is a great product. It covers all the simple things. Open office is ok for the basic. MS Office is great for the basics. I'm not reviewing the advanced features here: The face of the product is what the majority of users review.

I still support Open Office though. And I will still use it. But I'm not going to say it is better than MS office. It comes close, but still has to simplify and reduce.

Also, the author of the article is way off the mark to flaw the open source movement as a whole just because of Open Office's shortcomings.

Re:Alternate

[Superfarstucker]

By your reckoning, java should be much better than C# since it is, well, older, and more mature. It is easier to play catch up (C#) than it is to lead the way. In many aspects the latest release of Java was playing catch up with C#, which has surpassed java in many ways in terms of featureset (java finally gets generics etc.). I don't think there is a better comparison, because it's between the same companies but the situation is pretty much reversed, except microsoft actually had to pay all the developers of office & C# where open office has people hacking away on it for free (and is free to use). Now I'm not saying that OO isn't good enough for most purposes, but microsofts office suite clearly has a leg up on it and I believe the next iteration will only widen that gap. I also feel MS has rather underhanded business tactics but I recognize that is just the nature of the corporation. Don't think Redhat or Sun would do anything more honourable if they were in the same position. You can bet your beans they'd try to lock in their market if they were in the position to.

Re:Alternate

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I have a similar view of OpenOffice to you, I think. I'm grateful to those who choose to give it away, because it helps me to do some things I'd otherwise find inconvenient without paying for software since I don't install illegal copies of commercial products. However, I have no illusions about the power or quality of the product, nor its overtaking MS Office in any significant way any time soon.

In fact, without wishing to seem ungrateful, OpenOffice doesn't really have much going for it over its major commercial rival at all, other than being free-as-in-beer. There are countless useful ways a word processor could do better than Word, making real people more productive at real jobs or giving nicer output for jobs they already do, yet in five years of Microsoft not really addressing any of the issues, the open source world has failed to do anything particularly innovative, preferring to play a never-ending game of catch-up with the market leader.

What I really wanted to challenge, though, was this statement in the parent post:

Also, the author of the article is way off the mark to flaw the open source movement as a whole just because of Open Office's shortcomings.

Perhaps, but look at it this way. We know, just by looking at popular OSS sites like this one and the download stats from OSS web sites, that OSS provides a few big-name, mass-market products: Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla et al., that sort of thing. It also provides a wider range of fairly established tools for more specialised niches. And then it provides mountains of rubbish, most of which never gets to version 1.

Now, the list of advantages given by advocates of the OSS approach often starts with things being less buggy and more secure, on the basis of the "many eyes" principle mentioned in TFA. This claim is usually backed up by citing the relative scarcity of security breaches in Linux-based systems, the relative immunity of Firefox to nasty web pages, and so on. OSS is also claimed by some advocates to produce more innovative software, basically because the developers aren't tied to company conventions, can adapt faster to changing requirements from users, etc.

However, if -- as the author of TFA argues based on actual bug and feature request data -- you can't necessarily rely on user support to improve a product even for probably the largest and most widely used products of the OSS world, that blows that whole argument out of the water. OpenOffice isn't less buggy than MS Office, nor innovative in any serious way; it's a near carbon copy of the established commercial player, a few years behind the times in features and robustness. And if the OSS approach doesn't achieve the claimed benefits for OpenOffice, why should it provide any advantage for smaller products with smaller user bases?

To an extent, there is a genuine answer to this question. As I've discovered myself, the code base for products like OpenOffice and Firefox is simply too big for a keen amateur to get stuck into within a reasonable period of time. Just downloading the source and getting a build set up is often a chore for the many of us who are running Windows boxes, because so many products tend to be built using GCC on Linux or something similar. Smaller, less unwieldy projects might fare better here. But then again, does something like OpenOffice or Firefox really need to be the size they are, or is the source just bloated as a result of the less structured development processes that are inevitably used when software is being built by a constantly varying and geographically diverse group of volunteers?

In other words, while I agree that it's unsound to generalise too much from the author's factual data on a specific OSS product, that product does offer a pretty solid counter-example to the usual arguments advanced by OSS evangelists for the superiority of their approach over traditional closed source, commercial development.

Re:Alternate

[arkanes]

Honestly, I think it's a pretty convincing support of the OSS model, if only because it shows just how crappy proprietary software development is. The fact that OpenOffice (an especially poor choice of OSS poster child, but whatever) is even within an order of magnitude of Office (with literally hundreds of developers and tens of millions of dollars behind it) is simply astonishing. And in my experience, Oo.o is very close to Office in functionality - it's a little slower, and has a few less features (not anything I care about, but okay), lacks a little polish (but not much). On the other hand, it kicks the hell out of Office for usability (especially Calc vs Excel - whoever was in charge of the wierd half-assed pseudo MDI in Excel needs to be skinned alive and fed to ants), there is a much larger lack of mis-features - like the aforementioned psuedo-MDI, Clippy, the "Office Clipboard", and personalized menus, and of course the price is right.

Maybe what we need to be asking is not "If Open Source is good, why is it so buggy" but "If proprietary software spends 100 times the resources to produce a 10% better product, who has the better development model again?"

Re:Alternate

[BewireNomali]

I'm a normal user. Not a tech... I run three windows boxes and a notebook on my home network. Three instances of XP pro and one instance of 200 pro.

I have auto-update active on all machines. i have antivirus, spyware, and adware programs running on all machines. None crash, none slow down, none are infected. And all of my machines were cheap. Dirt cheap.

I use firefox; I agree that internet explorer is a shitty browser.

The reason the average computer user doesn't switch off MS is because there is no reason to.

And for reference, all of my horrid computer experiences have been with Apple machines. I work in film, and the entire industry works off powerbooks. The last production company I freelanced for had huge problems with their Airport. Then three Powerbooks went down in the course of a month. Then a drive broke on a fourth powerbook. Ipods went dead, etc.

I find it interesting what Apple users are willing to put up with given the comparatively expensive hardware. At the same firm, they made fun of my Dell notebook and my HP pocket pc. But with a 1 gig sd card i had music and video for my pocket pc that synced seamlessly with my notebook (WMP 10), and my pocket PC was perfect for skyping/gaming/reading/PIMing with. I can imagine that my gadgets can do way more than comparable Apple products at a third of the total cost cost. And I was always working while their Powerbooks were on some UPS truck going to be serviced. In my book, I was the one who should have been doing the laughing.

All of which is to say, experiences are relative. I imagine that most users (myself included) don't switch from Windows machines because there is simply no need to. Wintel machines do what I need them to do at a cost I'm willing to pay.

Re:Alternate

[bigbadwlf]

The spell checker essentially receives a D+. After I'm done writing a few dozen page paper, I have to paste it into MS office for because Open Office misses too much.

Firfox, for example, is receiving great press because it is a great product.

I see what you mean.

Re:Alternate

[nmb3000]

When I teach a section in my ethics classes about Free Software, my students (virtually all of whom use windows) are astonished when I tell them that my computers (1 GNU/Linux laptop, 1 FreeBSD desktop) only get rebooted when I update the kernel. They are convinced that rebooting every few days is necessary for, e.g., memory management.

Now, I might have it a little unfair. I'm competent enough when it comes to Windows that unless I do something dumb to screw it up, (details we can leave out) I rarely have to reboot. Well, hum, let's see:

C:\>uptime
\\Q has been up for: 23 day(s), 23 hour(s), 23 minute(s), 42 second(s)

Now, ignoring those eerie numbers, my XP Pro SP2 system has been up for almost 24 days and this isn't a record by any stretch. My work PC has been up for several months before. It was only rebooted because an annoying cow-worker remotely rebooted it when I gloated about my uptime. Our department's servers have been up even longer before.

I guess I'm just on some magical island because I hear all these horror stories and yet I rarely face any serious problems that are not user related. When that's the case they are nearly always hardware related. I don't think Windows XP has ever simply gone *bork* out of the blue and stopped working.

So it looks like I'm special, just like my mom always told me.

Re:Alternate

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Maybe what we need to be asking is not "If Open Source is good, why is it so buggy" but "If proprietary software spends 100 times the resources to produce a 10% better product, who has the better development model again?"

That depends on whether that extra 10% makes a difference to how well you can do what you need to do, I suppose.

FWIW, my experience is rather different to yours: whether you call them bugs or usability issues, I find quite a lot of the non-trivial functionality in OOo is bizarrely hard to use. Updating data that you're using elsewhere seems to be particularly troublesome: try updating a Calc spreadsheet you're using as a data source for a Writer mail merge, for example. I also find even simple adjustments of graphs in Calc difficult at times: I have actually found myself unable to tweak basic elements once a graph was created, even after extensive consultation with the generally unhelpful built-in help and the usually much more helpful Internet. Compared to this sort of thing, the equivalent features in Word and Excel are effortless to use.

On the flip side you have things like Word's "interesting" numbering tools. This is clearly an area where usability didn't quite work out as well as it should have and which has strangely never been fixed. Then again, I find Writer's just as counter-intuitive. Overall, and obviously just IME, OOo applications still have a lot more usability quirks/UI bugs. YMMV, of course, and by the sounds of it, it has.

Re:Alternate

[yog]

True, but still the article itself has a questionable thesis. He talks of OpenOffice as though it represents all open source software. In fact, there are thousands of open source programs which are used every day including at such companies as Microsoft. Or is no one at Microsoft using Perl, FTP or Emacs? That seems unlikely.

There is a tremendous and powerful set of server tools such as Apache web server, the aforementioned Perl, PHP, MySQL, and all the thousands of Unix/Linux command line programs that are used to run most of the world's servers. You would hardly expect Andrew Brown to complain of how limited and buggy Apache Web Server is and how much better Microsoft IIS is, not to mention Linux and MySQL and Perl/PHP--a laughable claim that would not be supported by the facts. This seems to sink his thesis; LAMP is the server to beat and has been a thorn in MS's side for years and are really your classic opensource, community-developed and supported applications.

I think it would be more fair to look at the bigger picture. Open source and public domain software pretty much dominates the back end, and on the front end Windows software rules. Yet, recent distributions of Linux are getting increasingly solid and easy to install and use. Recent versions of Firefox and OpenOffice and Gimp pretty much do everything any user will ever need, are solid and featureful and under constant development and improvement.

I think Brown is a bit impatient for the future to be here now. Is there room for improvement in the OSS model? Of course. Wait another year or two and (as he himself points out) version 3.1 of OOo will surely be fantastic, along with Linux kernel 2.8 and Firefox 3.5 and on and on. After a certain point, no commercial software will be worth the hundreds of dollars differential; the user experiences will be too close to call. There will be a natural shift away from Windows lock-in and we'll be buying our $100 laptops running Ubuntu or Suse or Fedora while Microsoft scrambles to be the next Google. Should be an interesting next five years or so.

Re:Alternate

[ClosedSource]

Discount coupons for MS software?

Re:Alternate

[dorkygeek]

1 example of poor design is the feature to export to PDF. If anything, they should have no export features, and then create virtual printers for CUPS, and any other printing system.

I am not very knowledged with regard to printing frameworks. But would it be possible for a PDF exporter implemented as a virtual printer to still do things like creating table of contents, provide clickable intra-document links as well as clickable external hyperlinks?

Re:Alternate

[The Warlock]

And when was the last time you updated Windows (or your drivers or what have you) or installed a non-trivial program? I'm guessing more than 24 days ago.

Re:Alternate

[heinousjay]

Shhh - you'll annoy the zealots, and it seems like they're hungry.

Hell, I've only rebooted my current XP machine twice - once to install a video driver update, and a second time when a game crashed the same driver. XP didn't even go down during that crash - it apparently switched itself to a generic driver and gave me a dialog explaining the situation and recommend I reboot to fix it.

As a matter of fact, the only blue screen I've had in the last three years was a dead DIMM. I'd call that a fair reason for the OS to go down. Actually, I'd be pissed if it didn't under those circumstances.

Re:Alternate

[fossa]

whoever was in charge of the wierd half-assed pseudo MDI in Excel needs to be skinned alive and fed to ants

Seconded. It annoys me to no end that two open excel files appear as two toolbar buttons but are both within the same excel window. Why? I don't want to resort to your pseudo window manager to view two documents at once.

Re:Alternate

[nmb3000]

And what exactly is a "non-trivial" program?

I've installed Office 2003, VirtualPC, Windows Media Player 10, Visual Studio 2005, and more... all without rebooting. Even the last version of Symantec Anti-virus I installed didn't want to reboot until after I had run LiveUpdate, and that was because it couldn't replace some Symantec files because they were in use. Nothing to do with Windows.

Most (decent) installers don't require a reboot anymore. The place where you'll still see them are when the program intertwines with the OS or is trying to modify something which is locked by the OS or another (misbehaving really) application. Even most newer Windows Updates don't require a reboot, depending on what you're doing when you run the update. If you've done as suggested and closed all running apps then the odds of needing to reboot are less.

It's important to remember that one reason Windows needs to reboot more for system changes is in part because of the file access model it uses. On Linux, stuff is loaded into memory and the file is pretty much ignored from then on. In Windows, when a program is using a file or the registry it can (and by default does) lock it to prevent other processes from modifying it.

I saw a comparison once (can't find it now) showing what happens if you run the commands "rm -rf /" and "del /F /S /Q C:\*.*". Both command do essentially the same thing, except that while the RM command pretty much wipes the linux box, the DEL command left a lot of files behind, ones the OS and other apps were using. The linux box started acting pretty oddly and quickly crashed. The Windows box continued to run, though with severely degraded abilities. They rebooted both boxes and the Linux box was completely borked. The Windows box gave the well known "NTLDR is missing" error. However, once NTLDR was replaced, the box actually booted up to a login prompt.

Anyway, the point is that as the consumer line of Windows has grown into the NT kernel it's gotten better and a lot of things including stability, uptime, and rebooting. Unfortunately the old 9x, NT, and 2000 claims of all these problems simply won't go away along with the old versions of Windows to which they were tied.

Re:Alternate

[dara]

This is the best short reply I have read on Slashdot in years. I can't believe it is only at +4 right now. I will only add one thing to yog's argument:

Sun sells StarOffice for support. Sun writes most of the code for OpenOffice and this code is used in StarOffice. Obviously Sun is in exactly the same place as Microsoft in terms of wanting to minimize the number of support calls.

Also a 100 full-time Sun employees is nothing to sneeze at. I don't need a more complicated OpenOffice for 3.0, I'm happy if most of the improvement (for a while anyway) is in speed and fewer bugs. 100 employees can do a lot of code optimization.

Dara
- I wish Sun had gone with SunOffice for their version and left the StarOffice name for the open source version -

Re:Alternate

[nwbvt]

"No kidding, what a flamebait article too."

Do you just regard anything that is critical of something you love as flamebait? That isn't a very productive approach.

"The rest is some rant about OS people saying users can submit bug patches but hardly anybody does."

...and you don't see that as a problem? The much proclaimed advantage open source software has is entirely dependent on the community supporting it.

Re:Alternate

[Goonie]

Anybody using free software to write scientific papers either uses LaTeX or has rocks in their head.

Re:Alternate

[nwbvt]

"He talks of OpenOffice as though it represents all open source software."

Like hell he does. He is specifically singling out "programs intended for use by the non-programming public", which end up being supported by a very small group of people. Exactly how much of this article did you end up actually reading before you decided you disagree with his conclusion so there is no use considering his arguments?

Re:Alternate

[_Sprocket_]

Who says Windows won based on quality? And who says it was "Windows" that displaced Apple in the first place?

MS-DOS was a key component in creating the commodity personal computer - or at least commoditizing the hardware piece of it. And because it was a key, Microsoft rode the wave of commodity PCs that washed over the Industry (it should be noted that IBM set that wave in motion). Windows comes in as a partner (and later "replacement") to MS-DOS as a continued key component to cheaper, more open PCs.

Windows may be an important part of history - but it is far from a dominant role. Windows owes a lot to IBM and, even more so, Compaq for the position it is in now.

I appreciate the general sentiment of the comment. I'm not so sure the grandparent's comment makes much of an argument. But if you're going to make pithy remarks about history, it would help to have some perspective and appreciation for the rather interesting and complex set of events that transpired to put us in the place we are today.

Re:Alternate

[DeafByBeheading]

But that's the thing--it doesn't represent all "programs intended for use by the non-programming public". If I were to contribute to an existing open source project, I'd look at just about everything else before looking at OO. OO is scary. It's a bajillion megs big, it encompasses a full office suite, and it's a single project. Sure, you probably don't need to know that much about Calc if you're working on Writer, but they're still tied together. I can't think of any other open source project that's quite as monolithic. I'd much rather work on something twenty times smaller.

And there are plenty of projects that are "intended for use by the non-programming public" that are twenty times smaller. Heck, the open source poster child Firefox is twenty times smaller (assuming binary size roughly correlates with size of code base, which should be fair). Brown raises some interesting points, but I think many of OpenOffice's problems really are unique to OpenOffice.

Re:Alternate

[shmlco]

"After a certain point, no commercial software..."

From my perspective, this is the "closed" portion of the open source movement, with the mindset that no commercial software, be it a Photoshop, AutoCad, Quicken, or an Oracle, has any place whatsoever. Personally, I pay for value received, and I value professional-grade tools. If FOSS has a viable alternative, then fine. If not, then that's fine too. For many of my uses, I don't want "good enough", I want, need, and demand the best.

Too many people let their various "religous" dogmas get in the way...

Re:Alternate

[DeafByBeheading]

Like PDF? Or are there honestly conferences requiring .docs? I'm honestly curious--my first real introduction to LaTeX was just a couple of days ago (I've been familiar with it and had seen its output for years, but had never actually wintessed it in action), and I was very impressed. Using a word processor to do something similar, even with an equation editor, seems pretty clumsy, and I wonder why conferences might require something like this...

Re:Alternate

[inflex]

Oh Great, I just found an 'all in one' installer for Lyx

http://developer.berlios.de/projects/lyxwininstall

Re:Alternate

[fymidos]

>If Linux is so much better than Windows, why hasn't Linux displaced Windows
>on the desktop market, like Windows displaced Apple?

Windows never displaced apple on the desktop, IBM PC and the clones (running *DOS*) overtook apple 2. Even when the macintosh with Mac OS came out, people still preferred the command line DOS over a state of the art (at the time) graphical interface. Apple *never* caught up with PCs again.

It just means that there are many other important factors, it's not just a question of which system is the best... In this example Apple had killer features: Graphical, multitasking (sort of) interface, faster machines etc.. but they couldn't come back, mostly because of the snowball effect and the open architecture of IBM PC.

Re:Alternate

[melonman]

The fact that OpenOffice (an especially poor choice of OSS poster child, but whatever) is even within an order of magnitude of Office (with literally hundreds of developers and tens of millions of dollars behind it) is simply astonishing.

Not really: most of the development happened when it was a commercial product (which had a fairly large niche market in Germany, AFAIR). For me, the damning thing about the whole OO saga from the OSS point of view is how little truly revolutionary has happened since Star Office went open source.

And before all the OSS groupies throw a hissy fit, have a look here for Linus totally agreeing with the statement

One explanation for why the Linux model has worked best with developer-type software - Web servers, compilers, the OS itself - seems to be that in these areas, there is much intersection between the developer and user bases. End-users contribute, actively participating in the community. In other areas - office software such as professional wordprocessors - the Linux model has had much less success. (StarOffice doesn't count as a "Linux model" creation, since it is proprietary and backed by completely commercial software.) Isn't this because in such markets end-users tend to be completely passive consumers?

Re:Alternate

[markdavis]

When considering what Stallman wrote, it is insane for anyone to think he meant my grandmother when he said there would be more users contributing code and fixing bugs. Yet, this seems to be what Mr. Brown thinks it meant.

OO is an absolutely *huge* and complex project that nobody but the "elite" can really program and I think that is no secret. Crap, I have been using Unix/Linux for 17 years and couldn't even get OO to *compile*. But Stallman's premises *do* work for much of the Open Source world. Even for large projects- look at the Linux kernel, for example. Fixes and enhancements are super-fast and furious.

Just because the OO project might have less community coding than other projects, doesn't make it a FOSS failure. It started life as a commercial project and it is the largest FOSS project in the world. The barrier to entry is very high. He completely discounts the importance of the non-code contributions to OO- artwork, documentation, website, marketing, feedback, bug reports, etc. Much of which is extremely important to the project and the success of OO.

I have submitted several bug reports to OO in the past, and sure enough, they were all fixed in the next release. I have submitted several more bug reports for the new OO 2.0, and I have every confidence they will be fixed in the next release.

Me thinks Mr. Andrew Brown is sour grapes. Are there more *code developers* for OO than for MS-Office? No. Does that surprise me? No. If the OO project had billions of dollars to spend on the project (like MS does), there would be much more. And OO has come a *long way* since the release of the StarOffice 5.X code to the FOSS community... much further than it could have, if the code remained a protected part of Sun. OO is a success in almost every way you look at it, and being FOSS is the main reason.

Re:Alternate

[budgenator]

but Dan Quale still invented the internet right?
No we have to agree the RMS is one of the noisiest and most visible to the unwashed masses; rather like Firefox and OpenOffice. Perhaps we should promote these projects as corporate open source projects rahter than the more commonly percieved community open source projects.

Re:Alternate

[DeafByBeheading]

Ok, good point, but how large does the average project need to be? Besides an office suite, I think only serious audio/video editing applications, and possibly special purpose scientific/engineering/mathematical software, even have the potential to get "very" big (using a semi-arbitrary threshold for "very"). And games, maybe, but for games, a lot of this is content (as opposed to code), although there are other reasons open source gaming is not (and probably will not ever be) as successful as proprietary gaming. He's arguing that open source projects have limitations, but he's arguing it by looking at an open source project facing possibly the biggest challenges. Most open source projects will never hit issues like this. Some of his criticism still applies, but it's *not* a fair look at open source development in general.

Atlest some fair comments against Open Source

[Brad_sk]

We always see comments bashing MS and praising Open source. Its good to see some fair comments on the other side too..

Re:Atlest some fair comments against Open Source

[justsomebody]

Actualy it is bashing closed source and praising OSS without even knowing it.

Staroffice was made public in 1986 and made OSS in july 2000. Its length is cca 10mio lines of code. It has made a lot of progress in last 5 years. Especially if you take the project length to account. And Staroffice had a lot more problems. It acted as complete desktop, which OO.o rid off. Bad language support. Even longer start times. A lot less functions.

Again, how hard is "many eyes" to make bigger and better result differs on few factors.
- was it always OSS? It is harder to maintain something you've not written
- how big it is? OO.o scales as very large project here
- How many eyes? In fact not so many as one would thought.

Taken these point to account I dare to proclaim OO.o is a success with a great future.

not open from the beginning

[bersl2]

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.

Re:not open from the beginning

[matthewn]

You're absolutely right, and it's completely unfair for the author of this article to hold OOo up as some sort of typical example of an Open Source project. OpenOffice.org is hampered by (a) an enormous (and enormously-complex) codebase that was originally crafted under the "cathedral" model, and (b) the fact that Sun manages ongoing work on the project in such a way as to make the pace of change glacial. Listen to Michael Meeks talk sometime about the bug fixes made in OOo 2 years ago that didn't see the light of day until the 2.0 release. OOo has bugs, yes, and it's slow, yes, but both of these issues have far more to do with the product's history and current caretakers than with its Open Source nature.

Re:not open from the beginning

[nathanh]

You deserve the insightful moderation. I was a StarOffice user (even paid for it) and I have found OpenOffice to be significantly more stable and less buggy. If anything, OpenOffice proves that the open source model works and the closed source model (that produced StarOffice) does not.

Re:not open from the beginning

[westlake]

it's completely unfair for the author of this article to hold OOo up as some sort of typical example of an Open Source project

But OpenOffice.org is typical of OS projects that have "brand name" recognition among end-users. In this market, the cathedral model of corporate funding and control is still very much alive.

Re:not open from the beginning

[Anonymous Coward]

an enormous (and enormously-complex) codebase that was originally crafted under the "cathedral" model

Not to mention that half the comments are in German.

I'm a native English speaker, and my German is pretty good (all of high school + a few years in college), and I can't figure out that crap.

Many eyes make bugs shallow, true, but you can always find ways to sink it. Putting the source in two separate (spoken) languages is a pretty good one.

Openoffice is special in that its barrier to entry is higher than any other project I've ever seen -- including the Linux kernel. I know C++ and Java, English and German, and how to download and build pretty much any program I run across. And I want to improve OOo. On paper, I look like the perfect candidate for this. But in truth, its build system is weird and complex, its source code is weird and complex, its architecture is weird and complex ... no wonder nobody hacks on it!

And what about Linux?

[Bananatree3]

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.

Re:And what about Linux?

[WindBourne]

Actually, I would argue that the BSD's are the more bug-screened OSS projects out there. And they are relatively bug free.

The difference is that Linux is undergoing massive development compared to the BSDs which are making more incremental changes. But most of the Linux eyes are on new code, not on stabilizing current code.

The obvious question

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:The obvious question

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Sorry, but I don't use linux because it's 0.0001% less iritating. I don't use Firefox because it's 0.000001% more secure. That wouldn't have been enough to make me want to bother.

I'm not sure them being open is enough either. I like the idea of tinkering, and I even do that from time to time, but it's icing on the cake.

They are better, so much better that it's laughable to think that people still struggle with windows and IE.

OpenOffice does not come anywhere close to that. Being slightly better should not be the criteria we aim for, and it shouldn't be enough to deserve all the hype we're giving it.

Bloat...

[DraKKon]

OOo's got bloat up the yingyang.. You'd think the 2.0 release would not be as bloated.

There's just not many eyes.

[LionKimbro]

"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?"

Depends.

[bwd]

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?

How about gnome?

[Beuno]

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.

Partially correct, I'd say.

[Hiro Antagonist]

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.

Re:Partially correct, I'd say.

[NutscrapeSucks]

> so the OOo core is more-or-less only developed by Sun

Yeah, if it wasn't for mean ol' Sun, there would be programmers lining up around the block to work on spreadsheet macro code and contextual help menus for free!

Or maybe, Sun does all the OOO dev because, frankly, nobody else would.

Re:Partially correct, I'd say.

[advocate_one]

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).

you are wrong on two counts:

count one: there was a dual license scheme where YOU got to choose which license to submit your code under, one the SISSL the other LGPL.

count two: the license changed recently to pure LGPL

"OpenOffice.org, which launched in 2000 under the dual auspices of the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) and the LGPL (Lesser General Public License), will now be governed only by the LGPL, the organization has announced.

Last Friday, Sun Microsystems announced that it was retiring the SISSL, mainly because few people were electing to use it. "Nearly all have chosen the LGPL," said OpenOpen.org community organizer Louis Suarez-Potts."

OO.o isn't buggy for me

[From A Far Away Land]

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.

Re:Only problem

[i_should_be_working]

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.

Early versions of MS Office

[witchman]

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.

A common misconception

[gnujoshua]

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.

Rubbish

[labratuk]

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.

Re:Rubbish

[Apotsy]

Perhaps those two scenarios (StarOffice, Netscape) demonstrate not that the closed source model is broken, but that companies use "open source" as a dumping ground for failed projects, hence the shittiness of their code.

Closed source produces a lot of good code, but you never get to see it (unless you work on it) becuase it stays closed.

Re:Rubbish

[Xtifr]

> Closed source produces a lot of good code, but you never get to see it (unless you work on it) becuase it stays closed.

Really? Because I have worked for a wide variety of closed-source companies over the last 25 years, and I have seen very little of this "good code" you refer to. One of the things that seriously attracted me to open source/free software in general was the much higher standards of coding that most of the developers seemed to adhere to.

Of course, maybe things have improved since I dumped Windows for once and for all back in '98, but somehow, I find it unlikely.

Ok with me

[Crouty]

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.'"

That's ok with me. I happen to have never ever desired to receive any support except man pages, user web pages or newsgroups.

It's because OO Isn't an Open Source Project

[Bruce Perens]

Sun hasn't every been successful at building a viable outside community for OpenOffice. And thus, it's not really an Open Source project, it's just Open Source licensed.

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

Re:It's because OO Isn't an Open Source Project

[jimcooncat]

An "Open Source project" is worthy, but just an "open licensed project" isn't anything special, is what I'm taking from the parent poster, a man who should know.

It's difficult as me, a consumer and advocate of what I call "good software", to understand what's good to back. The FOSS, F/LOSS, or whatever the hell they're calling the community nowadays has a branding problem. I think the devs are the only ones who can solve it.

OpenOffice needs more user input to be workable in an office environment. While the software's interface is much improved over the StarOffice that Sun purchased, it needs the touch of the lay person's input. Microsoft was able to do this for their suite by locking some clerical people in a room with close monitoring. But that was so many years ago...

Microsoft Office is the only thing a lot of people have had access to in order to get their jobs done. People have abused it so much -- spreadsheets for accounting instead of databases; word processors for automated reporting; OLE embedding video in documents. But now, thanks to Open Source projects, they will have access to the proper tools for the job. If they can only find them!

I'm much happier popping open Abiword or Gnumeric than loading OpenOffice. Small, light apps with a responsive desktop environment are what I like to get work done. The PHB's can ooh and aah over their little office macro apps all they want. I have entire programming suites at my disposal to leverage my limited knowledge!

The time of the office suite has passed.

Re:It's because OO Isn't an Open Source Project

[PixelSlut]

Sun hasn't every been successful at building a viable outside community for OpenOffice. And thus, it's not really an Open Source project, it's just Open Source licensed.

Huh? Sorry, Bruce, but you're going to have to explain this one because that just doesn't make much sense to me. Does "Open Source project" mean "something that's got an open source license and a big, de-centralized community of developers"?

Re:It's because OO Isn't an Open Source Project

[Bruce Perens]

Sorry, Bruce, but you're going to have to explain this one because that just doesn't make much sense to me. Does "Open Source project" mean "something that's got an open source license and a big, de-centralized community of developers"?

Yes. To get the full benefit of Open Source, you need a big enough community to drive work for many different agendas rather than mostly one agenda. The problem is tha OO is still mostly Sun. If this were GNOME, for example (which is a project upon which Sun shares work as am equal partner with a large community) quality would be higher.

And all of this makes me sad because the program is so important to the Linux desktop.

OO is Open Source because it's Open Source licensed. The OpenOffice project falls somewhat short of achieving all of the benefits of an Open Source project due to a lack of community, and that in turn is due to some of Sun's decisions about the project policies and about their corporate communications concerning Open Source over several years.

Bruce

Re:It's because OO Isn't an Open Source Project

[Miniluv]

And all of this makes me sad because the program is so important to the Linux desktop.

Is it though? I agree that an office suite is utterly vital to the viability of Linux as a desktop platform. However I think that interim solutions are also certainly there (CrossOver Office is quite stable, and while not directly open source it's a viable hybrid).

It really bothers me to see people keep focusing on OOo as if it were the holy grail of the Linux desktop, instead of one of many possible roads towards a fully functional office suite. When I need productivity apps on my linux desktop at work, I don't immediately fire up MS Office or OOo, but usually something from KOffice. Yes, there are times I can't because I know the featureset I need isn't there but when that isn't the case I do launch it, because it offers a much nicer user experience under KDE.

My point with this? OOo is quite possibly a dead end, and having wildly visible open source evangelists shouting its name from the hilltops doesn't seem to be parting the Red Sea to open a path to the Office Suite Holy Land. Perhaps instead if they started exhorting the hordes to understand the limitations of KOffice, or AbiWord, or Gnumeric, or any other genuine F/OSS productivity app whenever possible, to submit real bug reports and real feature requests then perhaps a real road forward might just show itself.

Honestly, this might even be the spark that ignites the fire that saves OOo. Remember when KDE was the only really functional desktop environment under X11? Remember how everyone with a real belief in F/OSS screamed about the restrictive licensing of Qt? Notice how now we've got two highly evolved, and several up and coming, desktop environments one of which was massively relicensed to be more in line with the needs of its user community? Lets stop beating dead horses and start finding solutions. We've done it before, and we can sure as hell do it again.

Part of the supposed credo of the F/OSS movement is that its always a meritocracy, and OOo just doesn't win under that system. Lets stop propping it up like a South American puppet state, stop explaining away its flaws, stop making ourselves look blind to reality with our zealotry. Also, for damn sure, lets stop nitpicking articles and missing the point.

Re:It's because OO Isn't an Open Source Project

[nathanh]

OO is Open Source because it's Open Source licensed. The OpenOffice project falls somewhat short of achieving all of the benefits of an Open Source project due to a lack of community

I don't disagree with the statement but I think you might like to find another term to replace "Open Source Project". You're drawing a fine line between Open Source software and an Open Source project; where the first refers to the licensing and the second refers to the development model. It's too semantic and will lead to unnecessary confusion.

Re:It's because OO Isn't an Open Source Project

[Bruce Perens]

I'm more familiar with Evolution. I'd call it an open source project, even though it was developed almost exclusively by Ximian/Novell employees. Is it not?

Evolution and Nautilus had the heavy lifting done by Ximian and Eazel, but both projects were carried out as subsystems of the larger GNOME project, rather than as stand-alone Open Source projects. My impression was that the larger GNOME community was involved, if not actively collaborating, that the intent was always to have the GNOME team accept those tools - and that the companies would thus have to meet GNOME's quality standards. The tools did have to go through GNOME's quality processes eventually, including, I remember, some usability work led by Sun.

I don't know much first-hand about how Eclipse went on, but wasn't there a consortium with a lot of companies as members? I'd assume initially not Sun, since blocking the sun is what eclipses are for, but I remember that Sun did eventually get involved.

Bruce

Re:It's because OO Isn't an Open Source Project

[Bruce Perens]

I think an interoperable office suite is necessary for the Linux desktop. I guess Gnumeric interoperates pretty well with Excel, but my impression has been that Abiword does not interoperate as well as OpenOffice Writer and that there isn't another PowerPoint-compatible. I haven't looked at KOffice lately, so please do tell if it makes the grade for these applications.

German comments aren't so hard to figure out. "puffer" is "buffer", and we have machine translation these days, so I'm not so sure that's the problem with OpenOffice. Also, the KDE team has a large Norwegian and German complement. It could be the code is hard to understand, but look at the Linux kernel, which is no picnic to understand and has an incredible community.

Bruce

Re:It's because OO Isn't an Open Source Project

[Korgan]

On the other hand, Eclipse is predominantly developed by IBM and, as far as I know, doesn't have the restrictions that you spoke of in OOo. I don't really know that much about Eclipse, but it seems to be fairly successful despite the fact that there aren't a huge number of other companies developing it along with IBM. Would it still be classified as an open source project?

Sorry, but IBM only started out as the primary developer. The Eclipse Foundation is now substantially more than just IBM. There are a lot of other very big players involved with Eclipse including CA, Intel, BEA, Borland, Sybase, Zend among others.

Saying Eclipse is dominated by IBM is like saying Linux development is dominated by Redhat. Sure, they're big players when it comes to contributions, but they don't make up the majority on their own.

Re:Only problem

[Elektroschock]

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.

Re:Open source is a joke

[A.K.A_Magnet]

What you call "open source" programs are just some loosely assembled code lines stolen from companies that make real software.

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? :)). Some would say: Software libre takes more than a license, it takes a design.

Word Count!

[taj]

>>
  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 ... word counts.

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.

Firefox/mozilla another example.

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:Firefox/mozilla another example.

[crimson_alligator]

"Netscape turned into crap as they piled features on it to try to make it complete with Microsoft IE and MS's millions of dollars dumped into it's developement."

And Open Office is crap because, basically, Office Suites suck, and they are just following the trends.

OOWriter is a slow clone of Word. Word sucks: unpredictable pagination across sessions/computers/platforms/printouts(!), primitive typesetting, asinine default settings.

At least OOWRiter can make PDFs and has acceptable default settings.

What would really make a splash is an open-source approach to word processing (or the whole office suite idea) that is better than the ugly, intrusive, slow, WYSIWYG implementation that Microsoft offers.

This isn't a polemic for LaTeX, but for a new kind of word processor, even office suite. Once you show people why Word sucks from a user experience perspective (and not just an idealist, technical, political, or economic, perspective), many will switch.

We need a wordprocesser that encourages semantic layout. I'm talking about templates that are easy to use, not hidden, with accessible formatting controls (think WordPerfect reveal codes).

Re:Firefox/mozilla another example.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

We need a wordprocesser that encourages semantic layout. I'm talking about templates that are easy to use, not hidden, with accessible formatting controls (think WordPerfect reveal codes).

I've been making your argument for years, but alas never convincing anyone with the resources to have a go.

I think a combination of making the use of stylesheets the default and (shock!) not even putting manual formatting controls on the toolbars and such by default would make a huge difference. Make the menus and toolbars very simple, with only the major commands directly related to writing easily accessible, and let the powerful, flexible but easy-to-misuse things be the ones only power users can find.

Obviously this can't happen in isolation. For a start, it would require extensive usability testing to determine fast and easy to use interfaces to configure the styles themselves, store them for future use, construct template documents etc. This sort of thing is often a chore in today's applications, yet I see little reason it should be more than a couple of clicks or a quick shortcut key to do most of it, if the UI places the emphasis on the right ideas that support it.

Re:Firefox/mozilla another example.

[NutscrapeSucks]

Note that all of the above was mozilla.org propaganda. It may or many not be true, but it was later admitted that most of the Netscape engineers thought it was untrue -- they would have been able to ship Version 5 in 1999 succesfully even with the legacy codebase.

As it was, Mozilla shipped in an extremely buggy form (Netscape 6) and didn't become acceptable to users until 2004

So, Better? Yes. "Smaller amount of time and probably with a even smaller budget"? Absolutely No.

And all of this was done at a fraction of the cost compared to things like IE.

I would like to see one shread of proof for that. AOL paid for a large Mozilla development team for four or five years. The cost was likely in the same ballpark as IE.

Twiddling under the hood!

[TheTiminator]

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

And let us not forget...

[MsGeek]

...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.

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 .DOC. Fixed. You might have to retweak some formatting, but you've cleansed the file.

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.

Re:And let us not forget...

[failedlogic]

The hanging intentation thing needed for APA? Easy... Do a hard enter on the second line of text, then backspace the line. Highlight the sentence (or sentences to indent, then go to Formant...Paragraph. Under special, choose hanging and indent by 0.2" (that is usually equiv to 4 characters which is the style I've been using).

To me, assuming OO were sped up, and it retained the same GUI, I cannot get used to it enough to be productive. I've found the menus too unintuitive to figure out. If they would kindly copy MS, I would use it.

iWorks is a nice program. I've been trying Pages for a while as well. I only wish Apple had chosen to make it more of a word-processor and less of a Desktop Publishing app. Maybe in 2.0. It does a great job with a Resume (about all I use it for). Keynote, though, is a bloody impressive app.

Re:And let us not forget...

[nighty5]

Nice post - informative.

Just to mention that Neo Office http://www.neooffice.org/ was born due to no native version available under OS X. Its only available in a 1.x source tree due to the massive undertaking required to get it work.

I wish Sun would do a better job and make it run natively under OS X, get rid of those static assigned libraries (.dll / .so) would be a nice start.

Also some beautiful / appealing templates in Oo such as those which are available in Apple's Pages would be fabulous.

I run Office under OS X because I can't afford any threat of loosing format, my documents heavily rely on templating and styles for consistancy across documents with other collegues.

But I put everyone else on Oo, its a great platform for those who don't require so reliance on formatting.

Re:And let us not forget...

[GAATTC]

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. In Powerpoint, highlight the slides you want to copy in one file, drag them to the file you want to incorporate them in, and drop them (or copy and paste). It is as simple as that. Ease of use or how intuitive a program is tends to be a function of the user's understanding of the program (in most cases) and not a function of one program being easier or more intuitive to use than another. I can use the programs I know well very effectively and when I have to perform the same tasks in different programs it is often frustrating. However, this is mostly due to my lack of familiarity with the programs, not because the functions don't exist or are somehow harder to use. In most cases, asking someone who uses a program regularly solves my problems very quickly, and then the problem no longer exists.

don't believe it

[markandrew]

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?

Rights and wrongs

[supabeast!]

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.

Re:Rights and wrongs

[OpenServe]

Indeed, the lessons learnable from the present failure of OO.org also point toward what makes Open Source work.. and the direction Open Source projects need to head in the future.

What OpenOffice.org teaches us foremost (though we've really known this for years) is that Open Source does not work very well for "big software" -- software that is monolithic and difficult for new developers to wrangle. If we could somehow plot modularity vs. success for all Open Source software, there would little doubt be a very strong correlation. Everything about "big software" drives away community. (and by "community" I mean both commercial and freelance/hobby developers)

Enter tomorrow's web applications. (but first get "HTML" out of your mind!) Exit today's desktop/client-centric software and replace it with modular, loosely-coupled, lightweight web software. Forget about designing software around the UI. Instead, think in terms of services and even intellegent software "agents" that automatically work together to accomplish what the user desires. Best of all, most of this software will be Open Source, largely because it will be so easy for anyone to develop their own components to add to the mix. Each component developer can aim for perfection and elegance within their component's limited domain of functionality. Welcome to the end of "big software" and perhaps the beginning of a true Open Source revolution. Unix brought elegance to operating systems with simplifying concepts like "everything is a file" and philosophies like "do what you do well and nothing else." Likewise, the web, as a platform, will bring elegance to how we build large, complicated software systems.

Those working on OO.org would be wise to immediately start porting it to Java, discarding old, crufty code as they go. Immediate benefits would include proper operation on all platforms and renewed interest from outside developers. The long term benefit would be re-usable components for the coming age of true web applications. An excellent place to start would be the OO.org import/export filters, as these would be immensely useful to web developers today.

not a good example

[Rutulian]

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.

File under FUD

[slymole]

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).

OpenSource alternative?

[msbsod]

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.

Re:100 times longer

[ozmanjusri]

Was it a doc file? Did he do it without opening the app first? Was MS Office preloader enabled?

No, OOo loads spreadsheet files fully into RAM while Excel only loads the part which is currently being worked on. The result for extremely large spreadsheets is that OOo is slower than Excel.

This is a pretty good example of how the FUD and astroturfers work. You analyse the competition for an area where your own product has a theoretical advantage, then just refer constantly to the competitor's flaw as though it was a showstopper instead of just a mild inconvenience.

The intent is to hijack discussions like Slashdot and prevent real comparisons which might show your product in a bad light. Even though most posters debunk the claims you've made, they're defending and discussing a flaw in their product, not yours. Eventually the FUD becomes groupthink, and you can't even mention OOo without some shill chipping in with an "Open Source office software is slow" comment.

freesex.exe?

[commodoresloat]

Can someone post a link or a torrent for this useful-sounding file? Better yet, maybe you could email it to me....

Re:Alternate -- only 2 bugs mentioned

[matthew5]

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.

You missed the point

[AnEmbodiedMind]

The point of the article is that the OSS process doesn't work so well for apps designed for the average end user.

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.

Brown quotes Ou on OOo2

[Jerry]

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.

Re:Alternate -- only 2 bugs mentioned

[dorkygeek]

-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.

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!

same reason office 97 was a success

[smash]

Because it's good enough to use.

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.

The (absurd) reason I use OO

[graymocker]

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.

I dunno, it works for me...

[flynns]

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.

Re:Alternate -- only 2 bugs mentioned

[frank_adrian314159]

Insert -> Movie and Sound.

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.

Re:Alternate -- only 2 bugs mentioned

[dorkygeek]

Yes, and no. Sometimes it is simply more covenient to insert a movie in a slide at that position in your presentation where you want to show it, instead of a blank slide, stating "Play movie now", and you then have to search for the movie and fire up the player. It's all about seamless integration.

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.

What 90% of the bugs were...

[Chordonblue]

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.

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 .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.

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.

Brown is confused

[penguin-collective]

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.)

As a potential contributor...

[pavera]

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.

Look at its origins...

[UtSupra]

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...

OpenOffice isn't exactly open source.

[Spy der Mann]

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. >_<