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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[Goonie]

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

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.

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).

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.

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: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.