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The Uncertain Future of OpenOffice.org
eldavojohn writes "What's the biggest threat to the success of OpenOffice.org? Is it Microsoft Office? Is it the simple fact that Dell doesn't offer it with computers? Not according to some participants in the 'open' source project itself, they say the biggest problem with OO.o is the fact that Sun codes, owns & makes all key decisions for the project when it should be more community oriented. A professor who participates in the project itself said 'enough developers are frustrated by both the technical and the organizational infrastructure at OpenOffice.org' and cites this as 'a real problem that is weighing on the project.' Other members of the community agree like Michael Meeks who asked 'At what fraction of the community will Sun reconsider its demand for ownership of the entirety of OpenOffice.org?' Hopefully with IBM's entrance into OO.o participation we will see the product become more community controlled & accessible. Has anyone else experienced this when developing for OO.o or another 'open' source project? Is it a good idea to criticize a company when they've put so much effort into a project that is technically open source and completely free? Is Sun trying to control OO.o like Java? Do they have good reasons or evil underlying intentions?"
Not continually improving both feature- and UI-wise, yes, no, around 3/5, yes, yes, probably, and both.
Now that we've cleared that up, anything else I can help with?
Not necessarily. The beauty of the license allows for forking. Just like you have the OS X variation. So OO will probably never die, but it might be forked and morphed under a different name eventually.
Hopefully having 35 full time developers at IBM contributing code back to the project will really help this situation. OO.o is great software and I'm quite happy with it
Sun will contribute 35 managers...
"Is it a good idea to criticize a company when.."
Is it a good idea to lie to a company or not provide any (constructive) feedback on negative issues just because they're being nice? If nobody is honest with them then their product may start off well and then head south quickly due to the pandering masses.
which is totally what she said
OpenOffice.ne--- nah, didn't think so.
Sun gets bad press for not developing free software...
Sun gets bad press for developing free software...
Tough crowd.
This is a panic piece, trying to rile upfeelings, almost trolling. Relax guys, Sun hasnt shown the steps that is being worried about here. When it does, then let us begin discussing. Till then, it is useless speculation and little better than FUD.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
As far as Sun's dominant position over OOo goes; as long as they keep performing I don't see the problem. New 2.x releases have been appearing every few months and each is a notable improvement. They're doing a good job and while they keep doing it they'll remain in control. Their latest release provides a platform for extensions; go develop your miracle feature and let Sun keep cranking on the core platform, as they have been.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
The question becomes does the community want another diffuse, nobody really in charge project, or do you want a benevolent dictator ensuring focus and quality control? Sun should be commended for sticking with OO for so long, when they could have just dumped all responsibility and let it drift aimlessly. They obviously have an interest, because with a few other tweaks they sell (or give it away to proper channels) as StarOffice, so it's doubtful they'll want to let go too much. Unless the Linus of OfficeSuites steps forward, then I'd rather see Sun or IBM maintain final say, to keep it on track.
From reading the comments here for years, the biggest issue with contributing seems to be that the code is a behemoth, and takes time and skill to understand. This hasn't stopped the NeoOffice folks from getting it running on Macs, and Sun's continuing final say shouldn't stop anyone from adding some missing features (such as a decent reference manager, or spell and grammar checker).
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Look love or hate Sun they are doing what they think is best. This is the same thing that went down with Java. Everyone here is free to (and most people probably do) disagree with Sun's strategy such as it is. At the end of the day though I think that Sun is crusading for an open path, and if Java is any indication it's working if not necessarily succeeding. OO.o will one day leave it's chrysalis and become a beautiful butterfly of open source software but for now Sun want to keep the reigns tightly in hand. As facile as it is to say in this context, if you don't like it go donate your time to Abiword, make your own office suit, or better yet try to look at the situation with an ounce of objectivity and try to see the larger plan here, namely to make a product that enterprises will see as an option to Microsoft.
perhaps this inner turmoil and frustration is the blinking indicator light of why things don't get done. I've wanted good envelope and label support for quite some time, and with recent releases it has gotten better - but not really. It is sort of like a stub article in a technical wiki...we intend to put something more substantial here notice.
Management is getting in the way of simple upgrades and additions?
Never worked for a company like that before.
cough cough
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
Why do so many people make such authoritative declarations that are totally unsubstantiatable unless you first accept that the declarator is omnipotent?
Why all the Sun bashing? Opensolaris is open source. Java is almost fully open sourced now. OpenOffice is open source. What the hell is wrong with Sun wanting to maintain some influence over the projects they started?
If this complaint is a groundswell, then why not fork? Call it FreeOffice or GnuOffice ? Does licensing prevent a good fork (btw I love xemacs)?
You must be new here. On Slashdot, only Google's "black box" search engine (and related products) and Apple's proprietary OS and hardware are considered "good". All other products and companies (with some rare open source project exceptions) are considered bad and/or evil.
Come up with a product name which doesn't sound like a URL when you say it. The current name makes me look like an idiot that is answering the wrong question. Next worse thing would be naming your kid "Ten Years Old".
...more proficient in programming than me explain why OOo uses its own inbuilt font rendering and toolkit? Aren't these things already provided by all modern guest OS's?
IANAPBPKEAITBD [I Am Not A Programmer But Probably Know Enough About It To Be Dangerous] but if cross-platform-ness is a big thing, would it not be easier to have a series of OS-independent libs in the background with native frontends in win32, GTK, Qt, etc? This would also make it easier to make the user interface more "friendly" by way of familiarity and not sticking out like a sore thumb? To my mind the problems users see with OOo, aside from some user unfriendliness in some sections such as mail merge, are that it's slow as hell to start up, even from warm, the GUI is sometimes unresponsive/laggy and it looks (superfically) different from most apps they're used to (apparently this is "allowed" for stupid flashy apps, but a big no-no for "serious" apps).
Chances are I'm barking up the wrong tree and my knowledge of OOo is hopelessly wrong, but for non-developers these things can be tricky to understand.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
So SUN drops certain ideas and keeps others--so does Linus! If you want to develop your own openoffice make a fork. You need someone to point a project in direction or it will go nowhere fast. The last thing this office suite needs is a big committee slowing development, it's just started getting good!
All I need is basic abilities for word processing and the occasional spreadsheet. OO.o does this just fine for me. No need to shell out $200+ for MS office, at least in my opinion.
Most of the complainer are just closed source shills who wants to use the normal divide and conquer method to try and alienate different open source grounps against each other.
IBM just added 30+ developers to Open Office.org and OopenOffice.Org just released 2,3 of course closed source shills are out to spread damaging rumors about one of the most successful open source project in existance.
Is is just me or have we not seen a large increase in astroturf shilling recently ?
Just saying it like it are.
Time to fork open office? I think so. This time without java please.
If you can do a better job coding, owning, and making key decisions, then fork the project and demonstrate.
If you can't fork because you need Sun's expertise, then maybe you should admit that Sun deserves to participate on their own terms, just as you participate on yours.
For years I've been amazed at how people will whine and whine about the direction an Open Source project is taking, rather than just demonstrating that another direction is better. The people doing the work are exercising their freedom to do whatever they want however they want it done. If you don't like it, not only is nobody making you participate, but lots of people have invested lots of work in giving you the freedom to do it the way you want to, instead.
It worked for EGCS and X.org. But 99% of the time, it's just whiners whining that they don't have control. Power and control don't matter in Open Source; we all have equal power. You have the power to control your own version, and if that's truly holding the project that you're whining about back, then obviously once you unleash your new vision of project management yours will blow away the one you're whining about.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Open Office is that, right?
/. users, but for the average Joe who has used Office everywhere else, OO.o is a different animal. And it's uglier and slower.
I just think OO.o lacks a focus. As other Slashdot members had said earlier, it seems to be over engineered and not thought out enough in a 'direction.' An engineer says "Java is a good idea to have" so they add Java... and bring other woes.
While I know some people may dislike the new Office 2007, after using it for a while now, I can say honestly that it's the best version yet. The usability and UI are greatly improved (once you get used to them). Open Office lacks the 'polish' that a Microsoft Office delivers. This isn't about document format wars folks -- it's about the sheer usability of one platform over another. You cannot invent a similar animal as a MS Office, and then go your own direction even if it's smarter. You have to adopt the platform, and make it your own. That's how Firefox has taken off so well. They came in as a web browser, same functions, and built upon it.
Open Office (and I haven't checked out the latest version) comes in and says that it's a replacement for MS Office... but it does things its own way. Some shortcut keys are similar, but a lot of stuff is different. It's usable for sure, especially for
Make it pretty, make it similar... then build upon it. Not before. Just my thought anyway... maybe Sun will take it to heart. I don't see any benefit or disadvantage to having more control in the community hands, because like they say.. too many cooks spoil the broth. And we will have a LOT of cooks all trying to make feature decisions, instead of a focused core of people that guide the direction of a project.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Once a project reaches a certain size and a certain number of users who expect the program(s) to remain usable then some sort of quality control has to come into play. This means that some code contributions will be rejected for various reasons.
Contributors whose code is rejected in such a manner don't need to fly into a snit and have a hissy fit about the project rejecting them. They're entirely free to incorporate their code into their local sources and compile and use the program(s) as they see fit. They can even distribute the modified sources and executables to anyone who wants to use them as well.
That's supposed to be the point of Open Source is it not? The freedom to have the code and modify the code and compile the code and run the programs.
Not the freedom to insist that your code be accepted and incorporated into the main source tree. (Well actually you're free to insist on this but the maintainers of the main source tree are equally free to ignore you.)
Clearly, OO has a large enough user base and developer base. Suppose the Sun is infact trying to control OO and that this becomes evident in future, then we will see a fork. If not, and Sun is actually fair and just, then there is no problem at all. Once a free software project has a large enough user base and developer base nothing can get in the way.
This is why IBM should find a way to resurrect and rejuvenate Lotus SmartSuite, particularly Lotus WordPro, Lotus Approach, and Lotus 1-2-3.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Sun weren't trying to act all warm and fuzzy about open source one second and then siding with SCO the next and then shutting their mouths when it looks like SCO is going to get a smackdown and acting all warm and fuzzy about open source again, people wouldn't be all suspicious about their intentions.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
Its simple really - If you dont like it, fork it - see if you can do any better. I can fully understand Sun wanting to call the shots on the #1 version - not too different from Linus. Note that they still make a closed source version of "Star Office" - maybe that gives them a need to keep control of the coding process. Good for them, I say..
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
I see the way Sun does it as MySQL or the free software foundation with respect to GCC. The code is open source. Anyone can modify and branch, distribute as they wish. However, if you want your code to be distributed by MySql/Sun/FSF then you have to give them the copyright, or share copyright with them. I think it's a fair trade off. They paid so much, they need to get back something, so they can sell it with different license, or have support for it. Also, one owner is a great thing actually. What if in the future there's something that needs to be changed with respect to the license. Do we need to contact a million developers, scattered all over the world, and some in heaven and some in hell, to get them into another license, because the current license forbid such use, but the move is very important to mankind? The one owner of the software can do this, for some money, or free, but it's there.
I think Sun controls it a bit tighter than needed, but this is purely speculation, I don't have facts. I think Open Office progress, but slow actually for a company developed software. If you look at how overnight, Apple get BSD kernel into the OS X shape. That's amazing. To have OpenOffice quickly take market share from MS, it needs to lift in term of usability, performance, etc. to the level of MS Office. I have seen so many people switch over to OOo, then back to MS Office. There's a good reason there, and they all said compatibility and usability.
I think they should copy all the goodness of MS Office functionality and styles. I mean goodness, not bad stuffs. As long as it's not an infringement. Some people said that why copy, why not invent something new, something unique. Common, if you can't do the basics of usability, compatibility and good performance, why do something more? Stick to the basic. Keep it simple Sidney!
If you do not like the direction that Sun is taking Open Office then fork it and run with your improvements.
Sun isn't getting bad press for developing free software.
They are getting bad press for developing it badly.
While I greatly appreciate the work that is done on OOo, there does seem to be something wrong when it comes to getting bugs fixed. For example, cell notes became badly broken in oocalc 2.x because they no longer move when their cells are moved (e.g. by sorting). The bug (yes, I filed it and I am biased) has remained open for nearly two years, and the developers have classified it as an "enhancement" rather than a "defect" even though it worked fine in version 1.x and is apparently causing problems for quite a few people with no work-around. I don't mean to whine, but leaving such obvious and problematic bugs unfixed for so long isn't good for the project. I don't know if this happens because they are understaffed or if there is a problem with how things are being managed, but getting the OOo people to pay attention to bugs seems to be a problem.
IBM is not the community. IBM is not even a company well known for open sourcing anything. In fact, they were the first IT company to be investigated for monopoly abuse, back in the day... Once they opensource AIX, and start playing nice, I'll consider them again. For now Sun is much more trustworthy than IBM.
The reason MS always wins is because they are the only company which doesn't self-destruct. Look at their competitors: with OS/2 Warp, IBM let their success go to their head, self destructed, and paved the way for Windows 95 to conquer the computing world. Novell self destructed, and paved the way for Windows NT 4.0 to rule the server world. IBM again self destructed with Lotus Notes, and the path for MS Exchange was laid. Then Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect imploded, clearing the way for MS Office.
Each time the market leader destroyed themselves by taking their market share as a fiat to do (or not to do) whatever the hell they wanted. Contrast that to MS, which maintains it's leadership by asking customers what features they want, what they like and dislike, spending money analysing how people work and think... MS is a company unwilling to rest on it's laurels.
And THAT is why all it's competitors hate it. FOSSies, Mozilla, Google, all these other MS haters have the old school mindset that, if only they put out their crappy product, eventually MS will do something wrong, and they can just move into the market since they are there. It's way harder to compete on the basis of quality, so the MS haters have to try litigating their way to success.
I wish you all the luck SCO had on that one. BWAHAHAHA!!!
Teh Lunix will always fail, because that's all the people creating it know how to do. Everyone helping with teh Lunix, or OO.ugh, or Mozilla, or whatever else are entirely stocked to the gills with people who are still bitter about losing to Microsoft. But they SHOULD be bitter at themselves, since Microsoft could have never succeeded had these guys been putting out quality software.
These companies lost to MS on merit... and that's the thing they will never admit. And that's the reason why they can never beat Microsoft. Admitting you have a problem is always the first, required, step to solving the problem... but the MS-haters will never admit they are the reason MS continues to win.
I think it is invalid to complain about a bug or lack of a feature if you don't use the dang product. Of course, that would mean that 15% of slashdot wouldn't ever be able to complain about Microsoft.
Seriously, they would have to shut the site down or sumting.
....their crappy strategy the last couple of years:
http://origin.arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.media/sunstrategy.gif
Almost the same story with me. The solution is to fix the bug yourself.
The future of OpenOffice.org most probably lies in a straight-GPL fork (which is allowed, since one of the licences under which OO.o is distributed is the LGPL -- and the LGPL allows for any work covered by that licence to be relicenced under the full GPL).
As a consequence of a recent EU ruling, Microsoft will soon have to be releasing documentation of their proprietary file formats. If a library is written for properly parsing these, in good time, and released under the full GPL (not the craven "yoohoo-guys-here's-my-arse" LGPL with its attendant pandering to the closed-source brigade) then this will help true Free Software projects and thwart Open Source pretenders.
The only ones who have anything to lose are the StarOffice people with their proprietary, closed fork and I say good riddance to them.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
...that would actually lead to a revolt is if they clearly cripple OpenOffice so that they can sell StarOffice. Even with the most dysfunctional management, the golden rule applies. And Sun has the gold paying for a lot of developers. Almost all the cases I can remember where the community took over the company was dead or dying, or the project was being abandoned. I think they'll come around the more people that share the effort (in forms of money or code, really), because they'd be fools to let this slip away from them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Weird.... why is it then that other projects like AbiWord, KOffice and the various other open source office utilities haven't taken over the market?
The main problem is OpenOffice isn't 100% compatible with MS Office documents. I have tried using Openoffice as a replacement to MS Word and Excel several times. Each time I end up getting burned because some executive pencil pusher thinks my layout sucked and looked bad. So in my attempt to use OpenOffice, I end up looking like a moron.
SO sure, I can use openoffice for my own documents, and then open it in Word or excel and format it completely when giving it to others, but comon. I don't have enough hours in the day to use something just to "stick it to microsoft", because honestly, the company I work for already has site licenses for Office and all other microsoft products. So in reality my attempt to use Open Office won't ever "stick it to microsoft".
It's funny to see those questions being raised out of the blue, just after OpenOffice released OOo 2.3.
It looks someone is trying to spoil the party.
"I think it is great that you have made this software available under a free software license, but I believe you could get more and better contributions from the community if you improved this procedure."
What I see with OpenOffice is that it is perpetually trying to be MS Office. It shouldn't try to be MS Office, with an always circa-5-years-ago. For OO to succeed, it needs to be better than MS Office. Make people want to use it instead of MS's offerings. This seems to be the case with a lot of open office software - they're pushed as alternatives that mostly do the job, but the "big" selling points are that they are free to the end user, mostly compatible with the competition, and use open formats. Look at what Firefox did - they didn't try and replicate an alternative to IE that was always chasing IE's features...they made a *better* browser.
If material cost were not an issue, now or ever, who would pick OO over MS Office? All OO is, and will be in the forseeable future, is the bastard wannabe kid brother of MS Unfortunately, Exchange is in the mix, too, because of the links between the office suite, email, and intranet. Where's the open source initiative to create a *better* solution than the MS Exchange environment? Everyone just focuses on Exchange compatibility, and as long as you do that, you're perpetually going to be playing catch up.
Really, they should start from the ground up, and create a whole new office app/email app/email backend. Whose goal is to be *better* than the competition instead of a cheap or free alternative. That is, if anyone really wants to try and supplant MS's share. Just my $.02.
I think IBM weighing in will make it easier (more developers) but I'd be sad to see the commercially-oriented development structure go away. I doubt IBM are planning that considering their focus is a Microsoft-competitive Lotus suite and not entirely freedom-oriented.
Taking some of the control from Sun, and having IBM give in some effort and direction will mean the product can only get better. Wresting control from them and doing a design-by-committee open-source movement might fundamentally destroy the package.
There are only very few projects which have been spawned from a commercial development and moved to a true open source, open development and open community design model and survived with a great product. One might say Firefox is one of them, but would it have even gotten there if Netscape/AOL hadn't been pushing their buttons to produce browsers? It's perfectly possible that, given the way most open source projects are run, we would still be running Mozilla 1.8 beta right now and Firefox would never have been spawned from it.
I guess, if you want to fork Open Office, you're free to. Go ahead, make Open Open Office and see how far you get. The best parts of it might be rolled into Lotus Suite and Star Office, or.. they might not.
For most free software, it is the case that those who contribute most work to the project, also influence its direction the most.
I don't really get all this talk about "success". I personally find it "successful" simply because I use it and it works. If by "successful" you mean "most used" or "only one used", then this story will be re-played. Perhaps what is being discussed as "success" is the control factor.
Sun being in charge is not necessarily the problem; the problem is that they lack the competence and vision to bring the necessary changes to OOo and are making it hard to bring in external expertise to fix it. Lets face it, they're a hardware company that also does server software. They sell products to enterprises, not to people. They've never had to deal with end users and they are not very good at it.
The simple reality is that Sun historically has done a less than great job designing and implementing user interfaces for end users. It's true for netbeans; solaris; Java and indeed open office that each of these products has a very long history of quirky, non standard user interfaces that pale to competing products. In all these products progress has been made. Basically solaris now sports a nice Gnome desktop (but they took their time killing their old UI), netbeans is undergowing the zillionth lets "fix the UI" effort, Java did great on the serverside but so far failed to get people enthousiastic on the desktop side (JavaFX being the latest misguided/doomed effort).
The Open office UI looks out of place on any platform. Ugly icons; weird fonts; clumsy stuff like the cross references dialog or the poor excuse for a bibliography manager. Yes you can sort of do most office related stuff in it and for most people that is enough. Sun has been fighting the symptoms for years and they seem to be pretty proud of their work. The truth however is that the overall Sun UI experience is mediocre or adequate at best across their product line.
What open office needs is somebody like Blake Ross to kick out the old UI and do a proper one. Blake and friends rescued the quirky mozilla from the fate that OOo is now facing: being a second choice cheap product that people use for cost rather than quality.
Jilles
Question 2 was "is the answer to question 1 'Microsoft Office'?" so the answer is "no", not "yes". Or if you want to answer "yes" change the answer to question 1 to "Microsoft Office". Fucking basic logic, what's wrong with Slashdot today.
There seem to be two standards at play here. For Microsoft, it's:
... but it does things its own way
> The usability and UI are greatly improved (once you get used to them).
But for OpenOffice, it's:
>
and
> but for the average Joe who has used Office everywhere else, OO.o is a different animal.
The point is that while OpenOffice has said it is a "replacement for MS Office", it hasn't said that it's an exact clone. The problem is the perception that it must be an exact clone to succeed.
I'll grant that there are changes to OpenOffice that can make it better. But as long as it's judged in terms of being a clone of Microsoft Office, it's doomed to failure.
Go read: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/ESC_minutes#Inclusion_of_non-Sun-owned_components
Sun refuse to accept the license they give to everyone else: why ? go figure.
Whether something has more of a cathedral or bazaar-style development is entirely orthogonal to whether it is free (libre) software. The FSF, for a long time, developed GCC in a cathedral style, and initially Mozilla was mostly cathedral (perhaps it is still). If we care mostly about the freedoms that the free software community cherishes, the way it is developed doesn't matter much. The Cathedral and the Bazaar are more caricatures or points in a space rather than a strict duality anyhow..
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
"the biggest problem with OO.o is" it's slow.
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
Disclaimer: I am one of the founders of NeoOffice.
I think there's already interesting proof that forks can provide a very viable alternative to the overhead of the OOo project. Although the reasons are many, one of the big problems I historically had as a Mac OOo engineer was trying to get patches approved by Sun engineering. It has proven to be more efficient to have engineering freedom, allowing us to implement things that might never be approved by Hamburg. Being independent also has allowed us to implement a binary patching system so our bug fixes can be delivered quickly and independently if any marketing driven release schedules. Being outside the politics has also allowed us to integrate other open source technologies into the application that are important to Mac users, such as VBA support as well as OpenXML import and export. Yes, OpenXML import and export could be integrated into OOo today but engineering politics and Sun's manipulation of the project to foment a document format war have kept this functionality out of OOo, doing nothing except harm users that need to seamlessly integrate with MS Office environments.
NeoOffice has been shipping a solid, native, GPL licensed Mac product for over 2 whole years. We have shown forking is successful. Dropping the politics of the OOo organization has made us more efficient and resulted in a better product that users appreciate. We have had a free software solution for Mac for years, and all OOo has done is exorcise all reference to us from their website. Perhaps it is just banishment for daring to do things differently and not helping to propogate the name of OOo (which Jonathan Schwartz has publicly said is Sun's second most valuable brand after Java). Seems a bit like Sun wants control to me. It will be interesting to see if Sun has the stones to snub IBM for its Lotus Symphony brand in the same fashion.
ed
Sun seems to be doing a workman-like job on moving the basics of the project forward, but at the end of the day, whether it's Sun or IBM or a host of independent developers, Open Office will remain as it always has been which is basically a clone of Microsoft Office for Windows as it was in the 90's.
:-)
For those commenting on how "someone needs to be in charge" in order for true innovation to happen (esp. around the GUI), I would point out that it hasn't worked so far. IMO open source programming is good for copying an existing software concept or for advancing technical details and bugs, but not for innovation, and esp. not for innovation in GUI's. For a true alternative to MS Office you need something new, not just a copy.
As lame as the current version of iWork is, I would look to Apple for the "next Office," or maybe to some as yet unknown high-school student imagining what that "next Office" could be like in their last period computer class.
I think the bizarre name (for a software package) is a greater drag on "OpenOffice.org" than anything the management committee might be doing. If they really think "Office" is a Microsoft trademark they should name it something else. Anything but stick an awkward top level domain identifier on the end. That is a marketing disaster.
Free software projects are a meritocracy.
If your code has merit, it gets in the build and isn't later removed by a patch.
If your project leadership has merit, people help you instead of forking you.
If your software has merit, people will use it because it meets their needs.
If you lose your ability, then you lose your code, your project, and your user base.
Apart from losing your ability, the worst threat to OpenOffice are entities who have big money riding on their office suites. Everybody takes money seriously, and big money means a big incentive to do something (very nasty) about it.
Just my observations.
The question was: has anyone else experienced the kind of frustration described by the OO.o coders, on another open-source project. And my answer is yes, I have had some experience with that.
I got involved in a minor way with a certain open-source project which shall remain nameless. A co-worker of mine, however, put a lot more into it. The "leader" of the project, who ran the SVN server and merged the code and the like, pretty much had full control over what was included into the project. The problem is, the guy was arrogant, spiteful, and himself a terrible coder.
My co-worker submitted a change to the core code that increased its speed in some cases by as much as 100 times. However, the "project leader" apparently did not like his own code being fiddled with. (He had written the module containing the inefficient code.) At first he rejected the code changes, saying that he "did not like the coding style". Then, he incorporated the code changes incorrectly, which broke a lot of other things. Then, when he finally merged the code correctly, he publicly derided it for causing errors, when in fact the errors were in completely different parts of the program and he knew that.. and which was later demonstrated, also publicly. Did he ever apologize? Hell no. He cut the contributor off from the project, and me as well when I spoke up about this.
In short, the guy was a real ass. I am glad he was not my boss at work or something. I would probably punch him in the nose and walk out. He was completely unsuited for "leading" a "team effort".
Yes, it is relevant. Sun found a way to get a huge, HUGE amount of continuing bad publicity: Mismanage Java and OpenOffice development.
What should have been good publicity for Sun became bad publicity, largely. It's time for the tired old codgers of Sun management to retire, or at least take a year's vacation. It would be better if they were irrelevant, but unfortunately they are self-destructive.
Full Story: Linux.com
In your quest for some reading material on the subject, here is an interesting article, "Open source business: differentiation and success". One of the comments reads like a warning label, "Open source businesses are driven back at every juncture to the community that uses and may potentially further develop the product on which they base their business model. They cannot abuse the trust or goodwill of that community. Or rather, they do so at their cost."
IMHO the community of users don't care if the developers and the company are having internal issues. They'll keep with what works. If it forks, they'll go with whichever side of the fork works the best for their needs.
I've been using Mambo and Joomla for 2 1/2 years. Sometimes Mambo fits the project, sometimes Joomla fits the project. Sometimes Open office fits the project and sometimes Kate fits the project. Who am I kidding? I use Kate or Abiword 99% of the time. OpenOffice puts the OO in blOOated. And that's saying something from a KDE user.
but if, as a person, i had ibm behind me, i think it would be stupid to talk about an 'uncertain future' for me anymore.
Read radical news here
it might be worth checking the uid of one you "accuse" of being new. I remember back when we could only complain about ones and zeros
m1m3r - n. - a leet speak performance artist that sometimes gets trapped in an imaginary glass box
Holy crap, a four-digiter! You must remember the lost time when the articles here were more than just corporate press releases.
But will it blend?
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Once it can do that, it's good enough (oh, and I have it on 3 new desktops since it came with Ubuntu, 1 desktop went to my parents, one to my wife's family and we use the last one. I like it, I think it'll blend.)
You can't handle the truth.
I've seen this many times in life and it is discouraging.
People wait for something to be working and then they pile on and try to take it over or destroy it.
I guess it is just human nature.
Is openoffice something that could be forked if there was a really nasty breakdown?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
OOo in the communities hands will suffer, much as the rest of most big OSS projects.
Too much vanilla..
= Grow a brain...
Sun keeps trying to have it both ways, open sourcing stuff yet trying to keep control, and that's becoming a nuisance. I think if there's a future in those packages at all, we should just get it over with and fork OpenOffice and the GPL'ed version of Java to take Sun out of the loop.
However, I'm not convinced that it's even worth it. OpenOffice and Sun Java strike me as pretty messy codebases, and it would probably be better to rewrite from scratch than to keep living with them. Although a rewrite in C/C++ would be a lot of work, a rewrite in C# or D would likely be much simpler (for Sun Java, people are already creating Harmony and IKVM, of course).
...Open Office will remain as it always has been which is basically a clone of Microsoft Office for Windows as it was in the 90's.Which was back when I used to like Office. 95 was the last version of Office I got on well with and there's not been anything more added that I, as a casual user, really need. Well, apart from the ability to open documents created in the later versions that everybody else uses to do things they could have done in the late 90's...
Now then. Where did you say those pesky, new fangled, textile machines were?..
Stupid flounders!
I stated I have lost a couple of members as a result.
They were not "Key" members though. Of course, that wasn't by far the worst part of the article.
The result is definitely NOT what I expected.
Scott Carr
From TFA linked above:
The news comes only a week after IBM announced they were joining OpenOffice.org and dedicating 35 developers to the project. IBM is resurrecting an old name for this brand new software: Lotus Symphony.
So IBM is joining the OpenOffice.org team with a token gesture 35 "developers" and shipping it with the OpenOffice.org name removed and "Lotus Symphony" painted on. What's brand new about that?
Stick Men
I use OO for all my word processing, spreadsheet etc. work (on Linux and Mac) and my biggest problem with it is:
the bloat and hte ugly, slow, spazzy / flickering GUI (for crying out loud, why does a file selection box need to be cleared and redrawn multiple times when it pops up?).
This is really the only reason I'm still on a look-out for another cross-platform office suite.
Why not try to make something better than MS Office? Something more suited to the task? Make Writer behave like WordStar, or WordPerfect 5, or some other word processor that was actually designed for people who write. Follow the Firefox model--they didn't try to emulate IE, they tried to make a better web browser. And they did. You're probably reading this with Firefox. Would you still be reading it with Firefox if Firefox tried to work just like IE?
That is simply a brilliant idea for an office suite's name.
Who on Earth buried these gems?
What I'd give for Mod-points now.
Be wary of astroturfers.
Whenever you see any article about a free/open software package that is a significant threat to some company's revenue stream e.g. OOo v. M$Office, Gimp v. Photoshop, Linux v. M$Windows, Firefox v. IE etc. you'll see lots of FUD comments about the free/open software package and positive comments about the competing proprietary package.
Marketing is about perception, not reality. If a product is perceived to be good, or good enough, it will be popular. It's almost a tautology. And the money's in what's popular.
Marketers of proprietary products live in fear that free/open software packages will gain a critical mass of people invested in them and growing them, causing the revenue stream of the proprietary product to start drying up. They will do anything in their power to stop that from happening. Marketers, "channel partners" (= paid subsidiaries), deluded non-marketing employees etc. they'll all FUD to greater or lesser degree.
There's always room for improvement but for the majority of people free and open software in most mainstream areas apart from games (and even there it's arguable depending on the genre) is not just adequate, it's good.
Despite the proprietary software marketing parasites never-ending FUD.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Considering that at its heart, OpenOffice is the same as StarOffice, Sun's for pay office suite, and that its core was originally developed by Sun at their expense and then donated to the community, everyone else should STFU and be happy to play within the guidelines set by Sun, or they can leave and build their own office suite from scratch.
It took 10-15 years for Word to displace WordPerfect. OO.o has only had 7 years.
(Word also benefited from working on Windows (albeit poorly at first) when WordPerfect did not. This parallels OO.o's greater platform support than MS Office).
Sun bought StarOffice, originally with the plans of selling a cheap office suite. Sun never expected to "take-over" the market, unless they were insane, but rather to hurt Microsoft. Sun and Microsoft fought in the Server room, and in engineering workstations. Microsoft has nearly unlimited resources from their Desktop and Office monopolies.
.Net and other technology projects that hurt Sun because they make so much money on their two main products, that the losses elsewhere are rounding errors.
If ALL Sun accomplished with StarOffice was getting a few Microsoft Site licenses to use it as leverage to pay Microsoft less money, Sun "won." If you see the world as a two player game (which Sun did), then hurting your opponent helps you. Same reason militaries bomb weapons manufacturing plants, to stop the resupply of arms. Microsoft can support
Sun wanted to fight for the control of the set-top box market with Java, cell phones with Java, etc. Anything that Sun does to deny Microsoft resources makes it harder for Microsoft to compete elsewhere. Microsoft failed to keep growing profits at the same rate, their stock price flat-lined, and their expansion into other markets was slowed.
It's the same reason that Linux advocates only compare themselves to Microsoft, they see it as a two-player game.
I'm sure Phoenix Office is already taken. We're talking lighter, faster, less corporate control. ;]
Sun has made several deal with MS to ensure that does not happen.
With the departure of McNeally as Sun's CEO the confrontational relationship with MS became a thing of the past.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Can you guarantee I will be able to access my data, created with MSOffice in 10 years without the helping hand of MS?
That is the crux of the matter. I don't care how usable MSOffice is. THat is a completely secondary matter to the fundamental issue of access to your own damned data.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... new here.
In the version we're forced to use at work (2002) the regex support is primitive at best. Leaving aside the fugly syntax, it doesn't even appear to be possible to do alternation (e.g. col(o|ou)r) let alone things like conditional statements.
:)
I'm just talking about the functionality exposed through the "wildcard" Find and Replace dialogue here, I know that the regex functionality on the VBA side is a bit more advanced, but I'd hardly call having to write code everytime you need to use a decent regex a "great regular expressions tool".
Give me sed any day
It seems that IBM may be violating the LGPL, as there is no mention of
the source for there oo 1.x changes.
I would welcome competition with open office. Sun, Novell, and IBM competing for the MS Office replacement. I'm ok with that.
I would like to get IBM's changes, as OO 2.x has always been fat, and a fork of 1.x may be a good thing.
But if IBM or Novell are just trying to switch from GPL to LGPL with the purpose of adding proprietary extensions, that never works very long. Either it would die in comparison to OO, or someone would fork IBM or Novels version, and replace/remove any proprietary extensions.