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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?"
"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
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.
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?
If they are doing a bad job of managing it, then yes. Releasing it under an open source license is good, and they should be recognized for that. However, doing so doesn't automatically excuse other problems they may have.
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
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?
...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
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.)
Lets see ... I must be doubly evil, since I'm running openSUSE both at home and the office ... and don't have a single piece of apple gear.
Sun isn't perfect, and neither are Novell, but they've done some of the major heavy lifting, and we should try to sound bit more appreciative, because we're not perfect either.
Otherwise, we just end up sounding like a bunch of fickle myspace bloggers.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Sun isn't getting bad press for developing free software.
They are getting bad press for developing it badly.
This sounds like more Sun bashing rather than any real issues. Consider Linux. Only a few people have commit privs. Any forked version is pretty much guaranteed to die by the wayside due to the momentum of the parent. And if you have good ideas there's a reasonable chance that they may be copied by a more established kernel dev and checked in under their name. Look at Firefox, only a few people can participate. Both are arguably less open than OOo and yet we don't see anybody pissing on them.
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.
At the moment, Sun pays for 80% of the development work on OO.o, Novell for about 15%, and a few other contributors do the rest. If you fork it, you will immediately lose 80% of the developers, and may lose a lot from the remaining 20%, so I hope you're up for a lot of work.
Or do you mean you want the 'community' to control it, but not actually have to write any of the code?
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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