Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice Illustrates Open Source's Limitations?
Cardbox writes "In his latest article in The Guardian, Andrew Brown asks 'If this suite's a success, why is it so buggy?'. OpenOffice, he says, shows the limitations of the open source development model. Brown is not your usual ignorant Microsoft-bribed hack. He has himself contributed macros for OpenOffice users. Brown lists the problems and assigns causes. He adds: 'If OpenOffice3.1 becomes a blockbuster... it will be because large companies such as Sun, Google, and IBM have decided that open source is the cheapest way to gang up on Microsoft, because it means they need spend nothing on support.'"
If Windows is such a success, why is it so buggy?
Large, complex pieces of software, generally have bugs, becuase they are large and complex.
StarOffice was purely commercial for a long time, until Sun bought them and opened the code. I don't know how much of that has since been replaced, or even how much of a difference this makes, but it isn't unreasonable to consider this.
Linux my friend is also Open Source, but is probably one of the most bug-screened OSS projects out there. It is far from bugged-out.
Gnome es open source. And even though it's not perfect, I have 20 people using it on a daily basis at the office with no complaints.
I think that it makes absolutely no sense to project open office on all open source.
The problem is twofold. First, OpenOffice.org is anything *but* an 'open-source'; Sun basically owns any of the contributions that you submit to the project, so the OOo core is more-or-less only developed by Sun (please correct me if I'm wrong on this one). The codebase originally came from StarOffice, and given what they started with, I'd say that they've made a hell of a lot of progress -- OOo 2.0 is light-years ahead of what StarOffice used to be.
That being said, yes, OOo is pretty much crap and utterly useless for anything beyond basic office duties; its spreadsheet capabilities are laughable at best (no simplex or network model solvers), and what's an even bigger kicker (for me) is that you can't really use it on OS X!
Sure, you can run it in the X11 emulation layer, but one of the reasons I bloody switched to Apple was that I was very tired of dealing with X11 being useful only for displaying terminals. Why would I want to run X11 when I finally escaped from it? Oh, and if you do run OOo under X11.app, you don't get any of your local TrueType fonts (IIRC), or any of the integration that makes OS X so much a pleasure to work with, from a desktop perspective.
Don't get me started on NeoOffice. It's maintained by two guys who have better things to do with their time, and still suffers from the shortcomings of OOo, as well as some integration problems (i.e., it doesn't even use the native printing or file dialogues).
But these problems are endemic on a per-project basis; Firefox is an overall fantastic program, LaTeX is great as well, and libgaim powers AdiumX, which gets a lot of use on my system.
But someone has to come along and make something better than OOo; I've half a mind to do it myself, when I'm finding myself not working full-time as a UNIX sysadmin while going to school full-time.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Openoffice is so wierd and often buggy precisely because it follows the closed source mentality. A huge amount of insane staroffice code was realeased by Sun. It had been internally developed. It had/has wierd custom build mechanisms. It misuses integers as pointers (hence making it non-amd64 safe). It didn't use common printing mechanisms like cups. It used/uses its own very strange widget set. It used/uses its own font handling mechanisms. It used/uses its own spellchecking system. It's practically a desktop in itself.
It's wierd because it spent the first 90% of its life as a closed app. And it shows. Remeber when netscape released their code and the open source world had to basically start from scratch writing gecko because the code was so (dare I say it?) awful? Well OO.o is a project that is several times the size only they haven't had the opportunity to do a rewrite. On top of that it's mainly written by three (traditionally closed development) companies who are trying to pull it in slightly different directions (Sun, IBM & Novell).
Contrast with open-from-the-start projects such as koffice, abiword and gnumeric, which are generally accepted as being much better behaved, even though they might not have all of the features.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I think some of this has historicaly been a trust problemn, and some has been their copyright assignment policy (which is also a trust problem).
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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)
...that Microsoft Office has a nestful of bugs on its own. I've had MS Office 2000 crash on me, I've dealt with memory leaks in 97, 2000 and v.X for OSX, and there are things that are easy to do in OpenOffice.Org that are maddeningly opaque in MS Office. For example: how do you do the kind of hanging-indentation thing that APA style requires for Bibliography lists? I have tried to do it in Office and it is not obvious how to do it at all. However, it's a breeze in OpenOffice.Org.
.DOC. Fixed. You might have to retweak some formatting, but you've cleansed the file.
It's also dead easy to take multiple OO Impress presentations and splice them together into one big presentation. However, try doing it in Office. Again, how to do that is not obvious at all, and it should be.
There's also something I brought up in another thread here: Open Office will fix corrupted and virus-laden Office documents. Just save in Open Office native format, then resave the OO.O native file as
OO.O rocks. I want to see a version that will natively run under OS X, but as long as iWork exists, Apple's not going to encourage it. OK, no problem, I'll run it happily under Linux.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I'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.
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.
Brown quotes George Ou's "comparison" of Excel with OOo 2.0's Calc.
Like many of Ou's comparions, he loads the deck. For example, Ou claims FireFox has as many bugs and security holes as IE6 and even gives the nod to IE6. What he doesn't say is that his data is flawed. While FireFox is developed in full view of the public, with the users contributing to and able to browse the bug database, the users of IE6, including Ou, are kept in the dark about IE6 security holes until Microsoft decides to patch and announce them. So, while he reports ALL the FireFox bugs, he can only report the IE6 bugs that Microsoft allows to be made public, which exprience has shown is much lower in number than the actual IE6 bugs and holes. Ou's conclusion: FireFox has as many bugs and holes as IE6.
The Excel vs Calc comparison was just as loaded, just as slanted and just as impractical. It goes without saying that NO ONE in the real world uses a spreadsheet the way Ou used it, contrary to his claim. IN fact, Ou's spreadsheet was both impractical and worthless. The 'test' was merely a test of load times, comparing Excel with OOo2's Calc. The Excel file was in Excel's format as a 16 sheet spreadsheet with 32K rows per sheet, each row having 13 text fields with a total length of about 128 characters, IIRC. Why didn't Ou post his ODT file as an ODT file for OOo2? Why did he have to convert it to an SXW format to force those who would test his work to reconvert it back to the ODT format? The real question is, why was Ou using a spreadsheet when a database was called for. Ou reported that Excel loaded its Excel spreadsheet in 38 seconds and Calc loaded its ODT spreadsheet in 141 seconds. I don't own Excel but I did download his SXW spreadsheet, converted it to ODT and timed how long it took to load it. I, too, got around 140 seconds load time.
However, as a programmer I want to use the right tool for the job, and playing with 500,000 rows of text data isn't a job for a spreadsheet, it is a job for a database. So, using OOo 2.0's database capabilities I converted the ODT spreadsheet into a database. That took only a minute or so. Testing the load time as a database I found it to take less than ONE SECOND!!. Then I let OOo 2.0 automatically create a form, using its form autopilot, with which I could view, search, navigate, add, edit or delete the data. That also took less than a minute to do.
Then, I thought about timing how long it would take Excel to do those things I did with OOo 2.0, but I discovered that Excel doesn't have a database, it doesn't have a form autopilot, so the time it would take to do those things would be infinite. So, by Ou's logic, OOo 2.0 is infinitely faster than Excel.
Browns other criticisms can be as easily dismissed. By relying on Ou's slanted work to prop up his smear of OOo, Open Source and the Baazar, Brown has unmasked himself as a Microsoft shill of the worst kind... Mimiking the wolf who wore grandma's clothing in his attempt to kill Little Red Riding Hood, Brown is trying to kill FOOS while wearing a Penquin suit.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Insert -> Movie and Sound.
Quite easy, isn't it? If the format is unknown, then do the following (from the OOo help system): "On UNIX systems, the Media Player requires the Java Media Framework API (JMF). Download and install the JMF files, and add the path to the installed jmf.jar to the class path in Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - Java."
HTH!
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
That's the bug.
As Edward Tufte noted, "PowerPoint Makes You Stupid." And trying to make your dumbass slide deck into a mulimedia extravaganza makes sure everyone knows it. And that goes for other presentaion software, too.
That is all.
And there are many legitimate situations on which to show a short clip, for example in education. Nothing augments a presented experiment more than the lecturer in his youth with long hair and beard, stumbling around in a small lab.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
This article bothered me for some reason earlier this evening and when I came back, I realized why. First of all, it's defining the bugs in question. I have been a VERY close observer and participant of the OOo program and I think I know what the vast majority of bugs are dealing with: MS Word compatibility.
.DOC (oh mighty 'standard' that it is today) as well or better than OOo 2.0? Even Abiword with it's years of refinement can't handle .DOC's fields near as well as OOo 2.0.
You can't really blame the OOo team for that, can you? It's hard enough to create an open, expandable format but then to have to convert a closed-source, purposefully obfusticated format (.DOC) to your own (.ODT)...? Can ANY of you name a single non-MS related program that handles
Folks, there have been documents written many years ago in the 3.1 versions of Office that a user here couldn't read with Office XP and yet OOo managed to read them just fine. Then you've got the Wordperfect conversion stuff, the PDF and Flash exports, etc. I'd say the team has done an excellent job with everything - especially when you see the original code (StarOffice 5).
I don't doubt that much of what the article's author says is true. Sometimes it seems that development is moving at a snail's pace. But I'd rather they do that than have them release something clearly not ready for prime time. I'd say they accomplished a great deal of refinement and polish with 2.0 and am really looking forward to the great bibliography project slated for inclusion with OOo 3.0.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."