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Michael Meeks Says OO.o Project is "Profoundly Sick"
unassimilatible writes "Michael Meeks, who works full time developing OpenOffice, writes in his blog that the project is 'profoundly sick.' 'In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition — we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux's recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.'"
Do users really need an open source desktop suite when they can meet their needs using a server based suite? Broadband is cheap.
Sun wants give the impression of making the software open but at the same time they need tight control over the copyright so that they can continue to sell Star Office.
The code is notoriously difficult to work with and the the owners of the copyright use this to limit the number of players.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
What more do you want them to add.
The rest of the stuff Microsoft has, no one cares about enough to add it.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
No one can compete with M$ for bloatware and useless feature exploits... so why try?
I'm of the somewhat biased opinion that if an app gracefully does what it's supposed to do, it's done.
OO does this, in my experience. Why try to feature-add anything but security improvements?
Oh good god, i had a hard time reading this. No blanks before punctuation, dammit.
There is no such thing as free lunch - making a good office suite is hard and thankless job, because for a rather big part, it's not interesting work.
There are many projects where this is different and some projects also hire people that the boring stuff gets done too.
OOo doesn't fit in anywhere anymore: It doesn't fit in on Vista, and it doesn't fit in on OS X.
There's not interest for it in the Business world - smaller companies don't have the resources to support it, and IT services company have no interest in not selling Microsoft Office licenses. Larger companies don't seem to be interested, but i have no idea why, probably because of complicated deployment, lack of group policy support, and lack of support for traditional office extensions, macros, etc.
manpower working on Linux? That's what I always assumed kept the serious development going, companies with a stake in it, one way or other.
Open Office is generally fine for writing papers. Sometimes I have to make two pdfs with it and then combine them to get over the hurdle of page numbers in particular places, but this is not a major concern.
anata sekai o kakumei surush ga nai deshou? Anata no susumu michi wa yoi shite arimasu.
agreed, if Office 2007 has taught us anything it's that if it ain't broke don't fix it. I've run OOo for a couple of years now on both XP and vista and never had any problems. Recently updated to 3.0 and apart from a flasher startup screen I've not noticed any difference.
I think it's just not that interesting and/or rewarding to work on an office package, especially one of Oo.o's complexity, for no monetary reward, especially if you have to also deal with the politics of getting it approved by Sun. If I had an itch to tinker with something like this, I'd probably write my own from scratch.
Ever since Open Office 3.0, I've been able to completely move away from MS Office 2003. I can create word documents that look exactly the same in MS Word 2003, like they do in OO 3.0. Now I can easily exchange documents between coworkers and they have no idea I'm using OO.
I work in aweful world of end-user IT for small businesses. These people are INCREDIBLY picky about how their word, excel, etc documents look. They are also incredibly slow at learning how to use office software. Switching these people from MS Office to OO is nearly impossible. People HATE HATE HATE software with a different interface. Most Office 2003 customers won't touch office 2007 for that exact reason. If OO were improved to the point that it could simulate MS Office so people could easily switch over, OO could take over. I think replacing MS Office with OO is one of the Big Steps linux needs to take to push windows off the desktop.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
But as a word processor and a spreadsheet I find them irritating and clunky to use. I vastly prefer to use Abiword for anything where I don't care whether or not I can work with MS Office format files. And I prefer gnumeric for a spreadsheet.
I don't like Office. I don't like how it's all one big gigantic tool. I want separate tools that I can pull out and replace if something better comes along.
OpenDocument plus things like Abiword and gnumeric are what I want.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
tell them the next version will run in a text-only console. Watch them beat a path to your door!
Like so many Open Source projects, it's not easy to get involved. It's telling about the complexity of a project that only a handful of people in the world bother to tip-toe through the minefield. Open source projects don't want people who can write code, they want people who can setup build environments and navigate a complex political environment.
At a job I wouldn't need to spend so much time setting up a build environment, there would already be a dozen people who have already figured out even the most intricate details of it. The person whose project it is should have fairly detailed information on setting up a build environment for their project. Open source projects tend to go with a "figure it out yourself" philosophy bragging that it's a rite of passage, but then they wonder why nobody is contributing.
Maybe I'd contribute to OpenOffice.org, but I've already got a mental block realizing that figuring out how to get involved would be at least a week long process. As luck would have it, I also have a week's worth of sleep debt and I already know how to fix that problem.
What's needed is something that's better and more useful than MS Office, particularly Excel, which is Microsoft's real killer app, at least on Windows. I'm a Mac user myself, so I don't care one flying fart about Microsoft or any of their products, but if anyone wants to beat MS, they'd better come up with something *different and superior* than Office, not something similar, but free. From a business perspective, it's what the thing *does*, not what it costs or how *free* it is, that matters. I am not a programmer, but I would probably go for something that's entirely web based, but that can also be used offline. It would do everything Excel and Word does, but much better and with some unique features and great usability. That's the real challenge. Google Docs are terrible!
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Prolly an issue more related on the convulsed build process and the barrier of entry to start typing a line of code then anything else...
How many projects are there that for instance, appeal to windows developers but that they don't touch because the only coding experience they have is from Windows/Visual Studio and the whole build process is based on Linux/GCC/Java with weird build scripts and the like?
Sort that issue and you will see more developers lurking by...
(expecting people to learn a new programming language to start to develop is ok... expecting them to, on top of that learn a new OS, install a whole machine and learn to use a ton of tools is a bit harder) ;)
This is an interesting issue - I develop an open source program, and it has the main features, is reasonably stable, and so in my mind is finished. There are other features I could add, but how useful they would actually be is debatable. I think this is somewhat similar to the state of openoffice, at the moment. So, what does one do in this state? (Admittedly, I have plenty of bugfixing and stuff to do, so I'm not out of work yet, but you get the idea)
-- All your booze are belong to us.
OOo is quite healthy. However, Novell seems to be profoundly sick: They arent even keep their employees in line.
This isnt the first time Michael Meeks is ranting mindlessly in a misguided attempt to promote Novells private fork (which has problems so big that the official OOo inconveniences are just laughable).
Michael Meeks isnt the only one doing this negative PR for Open Source: Greg KHs bitching about Ubuntu just hits the same chord.
One has to wonder if the Microsoft-Novell Deal was just a bribe to the Novell leadership to refrain from enforcing discipline among their devs. Either that, or its just incompetence.
I 'get' what the difference is between a text-editor and a DTP-package. I'm aware of the dichotomy between 'bubble-in' text (like in vi, or in a browser) and seeing text more as a graphical representation of curves that must fit on a page (that will look the same no matter what the medium). What I still don't 'get' is how an office text editor like Word fits in between these two extremes. To me it seems impossible to make the right choices all the time: fonts may be missing, paper-sizes change, graphics become dis-aligned. How do people cope with that ? The argument has always been that full-blown DTP is too difficult for the office grunt. But look at how complicated Word is now ?! A choice must be made IMHO, and that choice must be, like Mozilla, a scriptable DTP package that, in default modus, behaves like Word or some sort, but can easily be stripped down to quench the thirst of more advanced graphical people. No more following MicroSoft, which is useless anyway (.doc files can simply be written and read by some separate commandline filter, to be incorporated in the package), and finally making a choice.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Heres what bothers me about OO.o
Its written in java, and like most LARGE java apps, it runs like a 3 legged dog.
You can say that because its java, its more compatible and runs on all platforms. But only if the platform is supported.
Linux 64 with Java 64bit. That didn't happen for a very long time. As a work around, i tried compiling 32bit OO.org for my gentoo linux, compiling failed, the package notes basically suggested that black voodoo was required to get it to compile, and to use the provided binary packages instead.
As for OS compatibility, if you used a nice framework like say QT, you would get it while avoiding the instability and performance hit caused by java in the process.
Now for all the people that are thinking that i'm just flamebaiting consider this. Every time i used koffice, as primitive and lacklustre as it was, it appealed to me. I WANTED to get involved and help make it the greatest. It was fast, sleak, and attempted to be (but failed) what i wanted.
I never once felt that way with OO.org because the thing that needed most fixing was both its cleanness of source code and its dependence on java.
Yes i'm still an OO.o user, its still the most powerful free office software... But i'm not interested in improving it, just trying to fix what can't be.
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
Nearly every paragraph in the "article" begins with a disclaimer that the data (and/or the analysis) are flawed/biased/incomplete/not useful/meaningless!
Wow. Gotta do some quotes:
Firstly - the data is dirty
Nice
Thus it is possible that there is at least somewhat wider contribution than shown
More than possible
This graph is more meaningless than it might first appear
So, why are you basing are fairly hefty part of your argument on it? If it's meaningless, why is it even included?
So the data is not that useful.
No kidding
Is it more useful to look at an individual to see if they are contributing something ?
I dunno. You asked the question. Is it?
Why one hundred ? why not ?
It is clear that the number of active contributors Sun brings to the project is continuing to shrink
Crystal clear.
Novell's up-stream contribution appears small in comparison with the fifteen engineers we have working on OO.o. This has perhaps
Yeah, expand on that conjecture
So, it should be clear that OO.o is a profoundly sick project
Clear? Clear based on all those assertions they made about their data being dodgy? Yeah, umm, ok.
I'm sorry, but this is article is very hard to take seriously.
Pay them money and they will come. Candystripers aren't old and gray for any other reason.
Nevermind about candystrippers.
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS
amiright?
Seriously, though. It's quite a pity. I used to like OO.o as a OS replacement for Office. I haven't tried the newer versions, but it used to be quite good as long as you stayed with the basics.
Why would anyone want inferior typesetting and plotting capabilities anyway?
Replacing Writer by LaTeX gives you beautifully typset text (especially equations) with a rock-solid tried-and-tested system.
Replacing Calc by Octave and/or Gnuplot gives you much greater control of plotting, much better ease of use, and much prettier results than Calc does.
Seriously, as is OpenOffice.org is slick, very usable, I love it.
If those 24 developers can continue to right filters for new file formats (24 of them should be able to handle that), make bug fixes, and make the occasional improvement here and there I say great!
OpenOffice.org does not need a rewrite from the ground up every six months to two years.
Seriously, the guys from Neo Office don't have near the funding or man power of the core OpenOffice.org team, look what they've accomplished on "Macing it" (Macking it?).
Between Neo Office and Go-oo making fixes that the upstream developers don't take, I would say there's some FUD going around and there's more people interested in developing for OpenOffice.org than Sun lets on. I'm thinking this may be the first artificial rublings to justify dumping the project sometime in the near future since it's not profitable and hasn't been a big enough thorn in the MS side.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
be suspicious for other reasons. "Firstly" is not a real word. I would doubt the veracity of anyone who thinks that it is.
I would bet that as projects grow, fewer new developers join -- unless the complexity is managed.
Open Office is starting to feel like X11. It hard to even build let alone modify let alone test. It is a very old code base and it shows.
There is another issue as well I think. It is typically an application "end-point." Projects like Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP, etc. are foundations for other projects. People use them and contribute because they are interested in their own project and they fix or add features to the open source foundations to that end. The primary self interest is their project not PHP or PostgreSQL, but the open source foundations benefit regardless.
With OpenOffice.Org, there is no individualized primary self interest. If I add something to OpenOffice.Org, I only add it because I want it. With the code base as big and complex as it is, I'd have to want it quite badly. I can't think of a feature I need that much or a reason to do all the work to add it. OpenOffice.Org is pretty good as is, what does it need?
This is not a new article, I saw it way back in October on LWN: http://lwn.net/Articles/302576/ Still interesting though. The real question is: what are the alternatives? KOffice, other than currently being in Beta, is missing lots of critical features, making it suitable for only basic office stuff (which is still enough for most people, though). What other office suites are there? And if a developer wanted to help, where would he do the most good? OOo (yet it has always been criticized as a puppet of it's corporate overloards)? Or KOffice? Or one of the even-less-known suites out there?
Page styles.
OK I am going to sign up to be one.. Must not let MS formats destroy future history.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
I don't really an office user so I don't know how OOo compares to MS Office (even Google Doc is enough for me). But I think OOo should provide enough functionality right? Could someone please give me a quick comparison between OOo and MS Office?
There are many things that would float my boat project wise in IT , working on a word processor or spreadsheet isn't one of them.
OSS projects could distrubte a ready-made build environment in a virtual box image or something ...
Michael Meeks blogged about this almost 3 months ago. This post is right before the 2008-10-10 post. Though it's still pertinent, why is it only being dragged out on Slashdot now?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Its not like people are going to be rolling much OO code into their own projects - which is where the GPL licensing breaks down. The cost (giving up your entire codebase) is probably "high" when its likely a small fraction of OO code that is wanted (say some paragraph breaking logic).
OpenOffice.org software is under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3, which allows it to be combined with proprietary software. I don't see how use of LGPL modules in your code requires "giving up your entire codebase", unless perhaps you're on a platform that requires code signing and forbids end users to sign their own compiled apps.
It is very hard to get started in a big (open source) project. Not just because programmers *hate* documenting things, let alone commenting their own code. Add to this that OOo is a mature product, doesn't have a lot of features which could be added, which compares to the eternal TODO list of the Linux kernel, or the ReactOS project (which I am participating in as developer).
If there is one thing OOo could use it's a severe simplification of its design to slim it down size and resource-wise, but beyond that it's pretty much feature-complete for 99% of its users.
On a completely unrelated sidenote, did anyone look at the ODF spec? To me it looks nearly as convoluted as the PDF spec (which I've used to write an editor with at one point). Does such a complex format spring forth from a convoluted and complex (crufty) codebase?
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
For a while, I used OO mostly to assuage my guilt at using Office illicitly.
Then I found out that OO has a major advantage: internationalization for countries that just aren't within Microsoft's marketing strategy. As a (foreign) person working in Mongolia, the relatively basic addition of international spelling packs, particularly for Mongolian, has been a lifesaver - and though I haven't used it, there's a Mongolian localization for the entire suite that I think would remove a significant utilization barrier here. It's hard enough teaching someone how to click versus double-click; throw in a menu system in an incomprehensible language and you might as well give up at anything but the most basic data entry.
For this alone I'll use OO over Office.
And from a helping standpoint, I haven't done much beyond web-based DB-driven apps for a while, but with Ubuntu's relatively painless localization process, I'm trying to help out by doing Mongolian localization for the OS myself.
There are places for everyone to help - it may not be exciting but I figure you should pay it back in somehow.
...are insulted!!!
LOL! Looks like Michael Meeks will be working solo from now on!
Ever since they added those puppy kicking, and kiddie molesting plugins.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Seriously. Use OpenOffice is like to choose using bus, while having an own brand new and ready to go car.
I saw things like if you're geek, tech and programmer, you're either on Mac with xVM or VmWare (hence you can use better things), or you're on Linux/BSD/Unix and your world is LaTeX, Emacs and other scary-but-very-good-old-school things, because you use X11 for your 20 xterms to open. If you are anybody else, then usually you're on Windows or, again, on Mac, thus you have an ability to use MS Office.
Yes, OO.o software people are downloading, but I think do not use much. E.g. me. I have it. Installed. 3.0 for Mac. Ran twice: first time to see what's new and how it looks like, second time to make sure simple MS Office document gets completely screwed, when opened. MS Office has its own incompatibility problems. But, frankly, much easier to curse Microsoft 1 minute and then use really usable Excel, rather then feel happy 1 minute that you've got software for free, and curse your rest of the day, because Calc can not do most of regular things that Excel does out of the box.
Oh, and that licence thing... That's the last nail into its coffin, IMHO.
But personally, I feel sad for OOo. Nice software (could be). It already has lots of very cool features and could be good competitor. However, I'd stay on iWork and MS Office.
I don't use any word processors often enough to say (though it handled what I needed the last time I used it)
Or perhaps they produced a useful product already?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
is its philosophy of slavishly copying every feature, bug or antipattern msoffice has, but of course lagging some years behind. This is why it sports a near unusable scripting language and even a Clippy ripoff in the form of a lightbulb that is even more obtrusive than the original.
That and the silly three-eyed kaomoji abbreviation.
I had a look at the source this week in the hopes of fixing a bug. The whole thing is hard to understand, there are german comments and I couldn't even find main(). At that point I gave up.
I know what I need from an Office Suite, and OpenOffice already delivers. Seriously - what else is left to do? Replace button menus with ribbons or other such superfluous fluff?
If someone can articulate a compelling vision of where OpenOffice has to go, developers will come. Otherwise, why would anyone waste their time on a project that already gives people 99% of what they want?
What Sun should do now is capitalize on their web applications portfolio and expertise, and show the world what a truly enterprise class network office application suite looks like (hint: Google apps ain't it - yet). It's a high risk-reward play, however: they must succeed, because failure would reflect poorly on their development platform and services business.
Personally, I don't see that a network applications effort should build upon OpenOffice. It's an orthogonal problem, and tying it to a legacy code base designed to run locally would jam the gears.
It's well done, so stick a fork in it. Put it on long term maintenance, and move on. This is not failure, this is success.
OpenOffice is where it is not because it's a great project that inspired people to join the development effort. It's here because Sun was desperate for a major desktop app they could promote as being written in Java. So Sun pumped a lot of money into what was a commercial project that was destined to fail. Many people were grateful for a free office suite but there is competition now from SAAS that don't require downloading bloated software packages and runtimes in addition to the old brand name solutions.
Without continuous care and feeding by Sun or a similarly capitalized organization (like one or more states that are adopting linux) the project is going to fizzle.
As long as Sun refuse to take contributions and do meaningful development on O.O of their own, a fork does not make much sense because it would merely duplicate Sun's efforts. In that case, people might just tolerate the status quo.
But if Sun stops development or slows it to a negligible pace, people might get frustrated enough to do something about it. That is what happened with XFree, and today X.org is preferred by most distributions.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Remembering that StarTeam was a German software house, happily grinding away on StarOffice for many years before being bought by Sun; it looks to me like there is a well-established bureaucracy in StarTeam that expects correct procedures to be followed, and doesn't really care if those procedures are difficult for outsiders to follow.
So they got bought by Sun who has been on the mission to open source everything that might help damage Microsoft's monopolies. But StarTeam themselves probably had no interest in that and resent being forced to conduct things in public.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Whenever I want to configure something in an OO dialog I wish there was an [Apply] button.
The Apply button has been proposed at least since 2001 and I still don't understand why it is not implemented.
I guess developers need not apply.
Sorry, I meant StarDivision, not StarTeam.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
And also... when a project matures, it's only natural that only janitors remain...
One should think about making Base more fleshed, so as to replace Microsot Acess (*all-brands mentioned belong to their owners).
There's not much point in making Write better, since it's basically "there" with M$ Word; Calc can be made better but what is really essential? After 8 years, I had to buy Excel for quick, temporary reasons; it's cheap now (the student version) -- but I cannot avoid the thought that I will not need the few extra features it has in the next 8 years. And, out of my own volition, I still prefer to use Calc. In truth, I only rationalize things making myself believe Excel would be useful to test Ooo-generated xls files before sending them to morons who still are Excel-only... kinda like testing html pages which are perfect in Firefox to see if IE displays them.
Microsoft is becoming an annoyance.
Tsk.
Let's not forget about other upcoming suites: Koffice and the Gnome equivalents (Abiword, Gnumeric etc.) which still have to see their heydays.
None of what I'm reading in this thread addresses the coincident all time low of people working on Linux. This was predicted in a thread sometime last year, that when the economy turns into a bucket of feces, people are going to get tired of just giving their efforts away for free. With 401 K's plummeting like another space shuttle disaster, people with free time are likely looking for something to do that will allow them to retire on time. Working for free isn't it.
... a word processing system is tiny compared with an operating system. And if it isn't, that's the problem right there.
...constantly playing catch-up to Microsoft.
Microsoft .doc is arguably the worst format ever. It's pretty much just a dump of Word's internal state. To make it work, you pretty much have to re-implement MS Word.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
Open Source projects sometimes don't get it right at the first try. AFAICS, Firefox is an example of a profound rewrite done by a few main developers over a previous codebase: Mozilla/Netscape. And Firefox took off very quickly. Maybe we need a complete rewrite of an open office suite learning the lessons from Firefox. An open office suite is certainly a very sexy project to work on. Probably as sexy as web browsers and media players... That said, OpenOffice is almost "good enough" compared to MS Office.
Excel is a program that means that you can create shitty models with no proper auditability - which means that people who cannot be bothered to understand databases can think they are being clever (right up till all those quants got their last paychecks during 2008...). Word completely confuses the processes of content creation, editing, proofreading and typesetting, and allows the visually incompetent to waste hours pretending to be proper typesetters on a memo. Powerpoint is...oh, Tufte has said it all, I've paid for his books, you go and do the same and strike a blow for proper presentation of data.
People like MS Office because it enables them to waste lots of time and think they are being productive. Why can I write a 6 page white paper in a morning and it then takes the "customer facing" people a week to pretty it up? Because I was brought up on exercise books and typewriters, and was taught to leave presentation to people with presentation skills.
I use OOo because I need to read the documents produced by these people. But all my models are generated in SQL - usually nowadays in Transact-SQL running on SQL Server, so this is not an anti-MS rant - and my output is in plain text and PDF for things like flowcharts and system diagrams.
Fortunately, as I'm a dinosaur, I can do this stuff in Office and so I'm less likely to suffer a mass extinction event.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
MySQL (as being open source project) is irrelevant because there are other open source projects doing the same, and they are far more advanced already too.
The problem with OpenOffice is that it is too close to Microsoft's Office. It seems like the developers saw what Microsoft did, and then tried to carbon copy it. Although, I am no fan of MS Office, I think it still far less buggy than OpenOffice, and I say this even though I think MS Word is really terrible -- I use Latex for everything I can. In fact, I think the MS's Office suite became worse over the last 5-10 years. So there is plenty of opportunity for making something better.
I think, someone should start somewhere from scratch and make a lean simple office suite where the word processing doesn't get in the way, and with a new twist to spreadsheets (like Apple's Numbers).
Don't copy. Make it different! ... And try not to guess what the user is doing, because that always messes up everything.
The world would be a better place with a better Office suite and if it is different, it could also become trendy and then developers will flock to it.
Thats the problem OO doesnt do what you need it to do. It does indeed allow you to type, as does this text box im typing in now.
But does it allow you to use or even open advanced excel files? NO, I have tried. Or what about word files with multiple tables and calculations? NO, I have tried.
Being a chem major and a geek, I did indeed try using OO but its impossible.
Glad your experience was so great, but like other things, if your experience is so basic of course its gonna work and your gonna rave and rant.
I think that the day KDE works fine under Windows (I know there is a project but it is still not user ready, from what I read) many alternatives will appear : KOffice, Konqueror, it will bring competition against commercial software but also against open software. I believe it will stimulate development.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
I agree, I find the whole "office suite" approach to building office automation software profoundly frustrating, I didn't like it when Microsoft started bundling applications into Office in the first place, and when people started trying to develop open source "suites" that were even more tightly integrated it was even more frustrating.
What you get is a good spreadsheet, a mediocre word processor, and a bunch of floor-sweepings, all bundled together. It's a great way to create a barrier to entry for better third-party applications (who's going to buy Word Perfect when they get Word with Excel), but it's not good for the end-user.
On top of that, cloning all the flaws of Word (and even Apple is doing that: Pages uses the same hideous flat document model as Word) is so much the wrong thing. It just keeps that nasty application barrier to entry up. And of course it's not going to attract developers... it's not interesting work, and it's not work that's going to give you much sense of accomplishment.
Project Renaissance is expected to increase OOo's productivity with a new user interface and a little more TLC to how the user's use the software. Perhaps with the FLUX user interface, we can expect to get a little more attention from users who desire productivity and simplicity.
First the code is just awful to get into, just try it.
Second the buildsystem is not understandable.
Third, I had been packaging it for some time and well, it is a hell to build, to modify, to do anything with. Getting into how KDE operates inside was easy, same with GNOME, after 2 year I still don't feel I get the logic behind OO.o or that there is any logic.
Finally, I'd ditch the code as the result sucks big time. I don't remember a comparably unstable opensource application.
How about calling it a quit and start working on koffice perhaps, it's a nice codebase; or just start anew, from scratch but design it well.
Porting stuff from OO.o will prove to be quite painful anyway (come on, the .doc import filter is an uncommented piece of WTF with some remarks in german that don't help anyone).
In short, I've always had the idea that sun released OO.o to the public so that someone would finally help them understand how it works and clean up the massive dump which the OO.o codebase has become over the years of closed development.
I've contributed to a number of OSS projects. In each, I've been able to figure out how to do a quick hack in a few hours and, after a number of hacks, learned the code and style well enough to contribute within a week.
I've tried to get my head around OO and it is much more difficult. Even interfacing via UNO is far from obvious unless you find an example that pretty much does exactly what you want.
I don't think the lack of community is the result of an intentional slight. I think it is the result of a lack of human-focused documentation. All the existing documentation seems to focus on the communication MECHANISMS.
Imagine how crippled the Web would be if all the javascript programming documentation focused on javascript ITSELF rather than describing "document" properly.
I've only used OO a couple of times, but imho it compared pretty negatively to Word & Excel 2003. Mostly from the "quality" and "performance" perspectives. Assuming for the sake of argument that it is actually inferior, the question is whether that's caused by the lack of developers, or whether it is in fact ~causing~ the lack of developers. Few people relish working on an inferior product unless they think the goal of making it "superior" (in one way or another) is realistically attainable. "People" (in general) may have lost that faith in the OO.o project.
I'm a C++ developer and I was interested in participating in OOo soon after Sun purchased it.
I joined the project and started participating in the discussion about which GUI toolkit to use. The idea was to start using a common GUI toolkit such as GTK, wxWidgets, SWT, Qt, instead of continuing with the current GUI code which was a mess and was specific to OOo. A lively discussion took place and some consensus emerged, but then behind the scenes it was decided to stick with the existing code.
It seems so obvious to me that using one of the GUI toolkits would have facilitated sharing code and developers with the rest of the open-source community. For example, I wanted to work on the GUI code, but I had no interest in getting involved in this toolkit that was just for OOo, so I abandoned the idea of participating.
I think it's nice that Microsoft is finally trying to keep the UI standard across all their apps, but the Ribbon is really stupid.
I haven't had a chance to try a ribbon out yet, but everything I've read suggests that customizing the Ribbon, adding macro buttons, and most important, assigning keystrokes, is either not permitted or much harder than it was under previous Office versions.
Anyone who uses Office regularly is going to set up customized toolbars, add a few macros for common operations, and so on. It doesn't matter how cool or all-encompassing the Ribbon is. If I'm forced to use the mouse AT ALL for any action that I do more than once a day (roughly), I'll walk away. Mouse clicks are for learning and for casual users. I'm perfectly happy to use the mouse for apps I'm not familiar with. But when I'm using Word several hours a day, I want to be able to keep my hands on the KB. (FWIW I'd be happy to convert to *Tex but good luck w/ that in a corporate environment)
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
It's good that we always have the alternative for open office. Microsoft, thousands of brave men strong and not sick at all. Mwah ha ha ha.
as another poster pointed out, the dictionary states that it is "improperly used for 'first'". Which is the way it is almost always used.
So, yeah, it's not a very nice word, considering that it is misused about 99.999% of the time. In fact, I don't know a 'proper' way to use it.
There must be some Java junkies around with mod points, because I stated nothing that is not true.
People, please try to be ADULTS and mod only for real reasons! This kind of childish bullshit is exactly what drives people away from Slashdot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox#History
Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross began working on the Firefox project as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project. They believed the commercial requirements of Netscape's sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser.[9] To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite's software bloat, they created a stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite. On April 3, 2003, the Mozilla Organization announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird.[10]
What you hint at is "software as a service" or "Web apps", which Microsoft and others are eagerly trying to get people to accept. Why do you think that is? Is it because they're concerned about the greater good and not doing evil?
Even if the Web apps you happen to be using are actually free (for now), if the paradigm becomes widely accepted by consumers there will be subscriptions to follow. We'll all wind up paying for our software by the month or the hour, and a handful of people will become a whole lot richer. Selling consumers on the concept of software as a service is the Holy Grail of software publishers, has been for at least a decade. So-called Web apps are the latest foray, and it might actually be succeeding, if your comment is any indication.
I hope you get modded up. You make a lot of sense.
Office suites in general are profoundly sick, Microsoft's just as much as OOo.
First, they are gigantic, hard to maintain C++ programs. It takes forever to figure out how to change the simplest things about them, the programming environments sucks, and nobody has figured out how to structure large C++ programs so that they are easy to modify. OOo may be annoying as hell, but it's not worth spending several weeks analyzing the code just to fix an annoyance.
Second, they do the wrong things and they are obsolete. Smaller, more targeted applications are the way to go, and most of those can be delivered over the web.
This needs a mod-up.
It's quite apparent sun has been too slow in adoption of new code (and from other responses has been outright rejecting a great deal of community submitted patches)
Thus, several forks have developed which act more quickly and are more inclusive.
Yet another gloom and doom story about how "oss isn't working" by someone who doesn't get it.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
...They had to make a plug-in to find things. ;)
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/searchcommands/Pages/default.aspx
Yup that's an office-ial Microsoft site.
Back on Topic. Reply #26248659 by AmiMoJo says it best. Open Office seems to work fine for me. I don't need to download a minor version every 2 months. I understand developers like to code, but as a user I appreciate going 6..12..18 months without changing every damn app I have.
Pro-tip: That's how you know it's feature-rich.
Yet another reason I don't use Windows at home. Update Much?
If you didn't know yet, the document Notes/Comments feature was drastically improved in OO.o 3.0, while the old functionality lingered there for well over 10 years, since the times of StarOffice. The earliest related bug for that is Issue 767, which was opened on April 24th, 2001. Some Notes development now depends on changes to the ODF file format, as does development of other functionality that affects the file format itself.
Some of the larger items that the dev's are working on (IMHO):
One of the best things framework-wise they did so far is getting the extensions system working. Michael Meeks is right about the number of committed developers; the extensions system should now make it easier for third party developers to create required functionality that can be quickly added, while taking some heat off the main developers. The extensions system also made it possible to ditch the bulky and inflexible way dictionaries were managed.
The Linux kernel
The benefit of running the latest 2.6.xx kernel instead of 2.4.xx is better overall security, resource management and better hardware support. The Linux 1.x tree probably doesn't support ext3 and other advanced stuff, because that depends on newer libraries, which in turn want a newer kernel to function. If you still want to run something on a very old machine, then perhaps give any of the *BSD's a try. That's how I see it.
From what I understand, the code is so intertwined and convolutated that an outsider finds it difficult to get in.
If only they'll tear things apart, split it out into the individual components and have it all work separately (modules). Wasn't that the original promise? Some Sun VP actually said OO.o was going to be so componentized that you can include just the specific module you need in your browser, app, whatever.
Compare and contrast with other large scale development efforts like the kernel, kde, etc. Things are designed to integrate well, but are separate. This makes it easy to pick up a piece and work on it (obviously, if you pick up the virtual memory piece, that's still a lot of effort).
In other words, the code part of it still looks like what Staroffice looked like on the desktop - yucky, spaghetti, all encompassing.
Dude, what magical version of OOo are /you/ using?
By that rationale, Firefox's UI is shite since there isn't a print button on the toolbar by default.
Click the big circle button in the top left corner.
No sig for you!!
This is unbelievably true.
I haven't touched an office suite in years.
With modern spell check integration you can do word processing on a text pad.
You can buy specialized software for statistical analysis or expense tracking rather than generalized spreadsheets, but if you DO need generalized spreadsheets you can get that as a separate app.
Pure apps tailored to one single purpose rather than bloated suites are the way to go, and pretty much every market with competition is dominated by them.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Couldn't agree more
Using OO for OS X is, and has always been, a subhuman experience. I cant understand how the OS X version could ever be released in its current form.
"I would say that Inserting a ROW is a FUNDAMENTAL Spreadsheet option, done (by me) more frequently than EVERY ONE OF THOSE options combined! But where is it?
Then you'll be thrilled to know they thought of you.
Select a row, right-click, "insert". No need to go to the menu at all.
Guess how it works for columns? Yep. The same way.
I didn't know it's location on the main menu was problematic. Of course, that's because I found it right away in the most intuitive spot of all - the context-sensitive drop-down menu.
I have tried OO several times and always go back to ABIword gnumeric nvu (nvu is for html development). OO is just to heavy. The beauty of GLP-open-source is the real competition between the parts and pieces, a software suite just isn't going to shine. They should break OO into it's component parts if they want it to get better.
Perhaps if they removed the .org from the end of the product name, I (and I think many newcomers) might take it more seriously. That part belongs in a domain name, not in a product name. Actually, the name of the .NET framework bugs me too.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Hm, having read Mathias Bauer's page, I also think I see a culture clash between German business (which is quite hierarchical) and FOSS community.
Mathias thinks everything has been done properly, and that he discussed it with the proper people.
But from the outside, it looks like some committee (mostly) inside Sun/StarDivision had a meeting and decided what they wanted, and then expected this critical discussion to be disseminated *by the appropriate hierachies* to everyone affected.
That's not really how F/OSS works however. Individual contributors need to be carefully kept in the loop, not held at arm's length and expected to get updates from their company hierarchy. Particularly problematic in this case, where Kohei started as an individual then joined Novell, so Sun assumed he was in the Novell hierarchy. Which is why Kohei got such a bad feeling.
I have experienced the same corporate disregard, when a project of mine was integrated into a commercial distribution without any discussion. Now it was mostly a good thing, but I felt annoyed, especially about the thought of having to do more work to support the company. The least thing a company can do is to PERSONALLY CONTACT the contributor and explain what is happening. Not rely on messages on a mailing list; not discuss it in a far-removed committee; not rely on company or other hierarchies to spread information. Simply send a personal email to e.g. Kohei saying "We really appreciate your work which is great because X, but we can't use it because Y. We would like you to stay involved. What can we do to work this out?"
One could say that Sun's attitude is OK for paid employees of Sun, but not for others.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
If Linus and the other key (meaning, say, top 10-20) people involved with Linux agreed that they wanted to go to GPLv3, they could do it very easily. Linus just thinks that GPLv2 is better. If he wanted to go to GPLv3, he would have to have the agreement of the other major players in the kernel, of course, but that's about it. It doesn't matter much that "millions" (probably really a couple thousand, at most) of different people have code in the kernel that they in principle still control.
Linus et al. would just have to make a suitably public announcement that all of the kernel code is getting switched to GPLv3 unless the author steps forward and objects. There would likely be a handful of objections, and that code would be removed from the kernel and replaced.
It's an urban myth that the kernel can never be relicensed because so many people hold copyright to parts of it.
the whole thing needs to be restructured and done differently.
-- document interaction needs to be a library. have a libodt or some such. handle document i/o composition & links, compression, etc... should be at least two methods of using the library: in memory image & stream. The in-memory image would be used by word processors, and the stream method would be used by filters/processors (such as for printing.)
should have no GUI dependencies. Should be documented as an API, and have multi-language support (especially python)
that's one layer there. Share the layer... with the KDE people, Google people, etc..., etc... get a really good document i/o layer. That's a project all by itself.
Someone can use the library to do a cli-based spell checker, or have a simple 'view' application without starting up the whole ooo. The key thing is that it is a component that is useful in and of itself, and doesn't need to be integrated in anything.
A level up is analysis & transformations on the document. libodtscan is a generic library to find a bunch of things that match criteria, return the list, then update the list to keep it current as changes are made. This generic function would underlie: spell-checking, tofc/table generation, grammar checking, search & replace.
That layer will operate on in-memory representations of ODT. Again, if exposed as an API, this could be a shared component among all the projects, and get good critical mass easily. So this libodtscan is a project in an of itself, can use the libodt to do file i/o, but fundamentally operates on the in-memory structure.
After that you have a whole bunch of users of the transformation layer that implement different functions: grammar checking, in a spreadsheet sum functions etc...,
The UI, should be a layer on top of that. my old fogey side would like a curses one to start with, and there should be lots of them... one in QT, one in GTK, etc...
the UI's are yet another layer where one can have competing implementations, and communities can build around it.
For all I know, OOO is already somewhat structured like this, but I cannot tell, it's too impenetrable. Open source projects work best when they are small and focused on minutiae, to polish that stone really perfectly. OOO is like polishing Mont Blanc.
Oh, there's more trouble with tables than that. In fact, OO.o's shit table support is the reason I failed to switch to it during grad school (ca 2004), and even though I always keep the current version installed, hoping that one day it'll work right, it hasn't been fixed yet.
OO.o's bizarre idea that cells have borders that are theirs alone (as opposed to being shared with adjacent cells) means that trying to get table lines to look nice is a nightmare. If you don't do it just right, you'll end up with double-thick lines in some places, and weirdly off-center lines everywhere else.
Trying to get all the rows or columns to be the same size is an exercise in frustration.
Exports of documents to either .rtf or .doc sees the tables' careful formatting destroyed when opened in Word (please spare me the "that's a Word problem!" BS; Word is the industry standard--everyone else needs to fit it, not the other way around).
Paragraph spacing doesn't seem to affect tables. In Word, the best way to make your table's rows even is to apply a paragraph style that has, say, 1pt above and below. This way, no row boundary can get closer to the text than that, and all you have to do to make everything tidy is have the table conform to the contents. It looks great and is trivial to do. Not the case in OO.o. You have to fiddle with crap.
OO.o is phenomenal, considering its free, and it hits all the major necessary features solidly. But there are enough little unpleasant surprises lurking in there as to make it a no-go for people who have to prepare a lot of documents for work or whatever.
It's not finished, and I actually don't understand what has changed since 1.1.1 (the version I started out with). Version 3.0 seems to be the same program. It's clear that, although it's not finished, the devs are finished with it.
I don't see the point in using activity as a measure of a program's success. The real questions are whether it has the desired functionality, whether it is sufficiently easy to use for its purpose, whether bugs are resolved with appropriate speed and whether it runs on the desired set of platforms. A mature program may need very little modification. This isn't to say that OO is perfect, but whatever its failings are, this doesn't measure them.
Similarly, the number of people involved is not in and of itself a useful measure. There are plenty of quite successful projects in which virtually all of the work (up to the occasional patch submitted with a bug report and that sort of thing) is done by a single person.
I also believe is an elected board of contributors who would be entrusted with guidance of the project.
For my part, I'd like to ask you to join me in pledging to donate 24 hrs to the project in 2009. Is that asking too much?
Now for my personal wish: use postgresql (or mysql) as the back end database. MAJOR front end work (forms & reports) is needed on this aspect of Oo. This is the one area that is woefully behind the rest of the suite.
All in all, we have to give a lot of thanks for the amazing work that has gone into this project - all the many, many hours of work that we have to be thankful for. So, make a pledge to give 1/365th of your year to this valuable Microsoft beater. Let's no argue, let's work to improve it.
*** Don't be dull.***
This is a real deal-breaker for lots of people. Relying on server-based software, especially when the servers are controlled by a third party, unnecessarily increases complications, possible failure modes, and exposure to unnecessary risks. One of the core tenets of any sort of project management is to eliminate or ameliorate risk wherever possible. This makes server-based software a complete non-starter for many different situations.
I'm sure I could come up with more reasons, but the one above is so compelling, that's as far as I'm going to go for right now. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Oh, so that's why Bill's address isn't widely available!
(Laugh, it's a joke.)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
... what else needs to be done?
^P
Take someone else's work.
Make a few changes.
Attempt to get money for it.
The whole idea of open source is sharing stuff that other people are sharing with you. IMHO (as someone unconnected to both projects) if you want to write MS Windows style shareware on a different platform it's best to start with your own work instead of pissing off the people that are giving the stuff to you for nothing.
While they apparently put a lot of work in I really think it is better to go around a project like that instead of having a team supporting a couple of guys on the outside that are getting a few bucks from those few honest enough to make donations. It looks to me as if there were far more people working on the mac port than there are working on NeoOffice. The NeoOffice people saw a niche where they thought they could make money from open software but now it is gone. It's a pity it was never an open project - if it was there may have been a few more people working on it, the load would have been spread more evenly (so no need for donations that probably rarely arrived) and it would probably have been more functional.
Psst: want to know why fewer developers than ever are willing to code for free? Because fewer are getting paid these days, due to mass layoffs!
When one is unsure where their next paycheck is coming-from, developing for an OSS project is going to drop in priority. The fact that the Linux kernel is seeing a record low number of devs ought to be supporting correlation here...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Ok, so we're shamelessly off topic, but that was a great rant on the ribbon.
My personal peeve is "paste special" which also bops around between apps.
John Faughnan
jfaughnan@spamcop.net
Let's talk basic functionality -- word count. Many different important word processor use cases, professional and academic, absolutely require sensible word counts -- counts that include just the selected text, or that include the whole document, or that count everything except footnotes and endnotes, for example. OOo's word count functionality is bare-bones in the extreme, and doesn't offer anything but counts of selected text, and the whole document. For that matter, it doesn't even count mixed Asian-Western text properly, meaning that no one dealing with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (the CJK languages) can use OOo for anything beyond casual use (i.e. why bother).
I would dearly love to avoid the MS tax and ditch MS Office, but OOo leaves me unable to do so. (Thankfully, IBM has stepped up to the plate with Lotus Symphony, but that's both closed-source and a bitch to install...) And it's not for lack of bug reporting -- I've known for blooming years that OOo is a sick, dysfunctional project simply from the number of brain-dead bugs that linger and linger and linger and linger and linger , with no signs of progress or even any forecast of when they might be fixed.
Take the word count bug, Issue 17964. This has been on the books since 2003, FFS, with no real progress -- all they've done to address any of the details described is to add Word Count to the Tools menu. Or take the related enhancement of allowing word counts of selected text as opposed to just the whole document, Issue 4568. This was first posted in May 2002, and took until November 2007 to be implemented. This is absolutely required basic functionality for any word processing program intended for professional or academic use (i.e. almost any word processor at all), and it took over five freaking years for the OOo devs to get around to it.
I simply have to ask, what in the devil's briefcase are Sun and the OOo devs doing ? They make Vista look like development time well spent.
Frustratedly,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I'm of no relation to the OP, but simply from my own frustrating experience of trying to slog through their API documentation, I'd have to agree with the overall point that Sun has done no one any favours when it comes to clarity.
Say, for example, that you're trying to whip up a simple script to munge some text in a Writer document. After considerable reading around, you might discover that you need an object of type TextCursor to work with Writer text. So you dig into the API docs to try to find out what properties and methods a TextCursor object has.
Please, read the TextCursor API page linked above, and then see if you can quickly understand what properties and methods a TextCursor object has.
If the OOo source code and related documentation are at all similar to the API documentation, then I must say that I'm frankly flabbergasted that the project has made any progress at all.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Couldn't've said it better myself.
Sadly,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
As I posted earlier in a different thread, OOo already *has* API documentation, but it sucks rocks. So rather than just providing any old documentation, I would like to exhort all FOSS people to provide sensible, usable, understandable documentation. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
It's just plain harder to do some things in OO and that makes it take more time and energy to produce the same outcome.
Fonts, font names, are screwed up beyond belief, I know, it seems trivial, but when I have to hunt for a decent font in a list that stretches for miles, something is wrong......
It is easier and quicker for me to create a music chart from transcription in Word because it is easier to work with. OO has a fair amount of functionality, but to call it on par is just fantasy.
that says I cannot criticize e.e. Cummings for his use of language? I don't think so.
I would characterize "secondly" and "thirdly" as being in exactly the same boat -- that of laziness over precision -- rather than trying to use them as an excuse for "firstly". Three wrongs do not make a right.
In any case, we can disagree. That is fine. If you want to use the dictionary as your authority so be it. But you are not going to change my opinion, which has some justification as well.
A key issue is that for years now there have been debates about OpenOffice.org's source code being put under the control of a foundation with representatives from all major contributors, rather than Sun's corporate ownership. This would be the first step they need to take to allay the problems, but they've just put off doing it, which IMHO has decreased trust.
...nothing ever gets fixed in OO.o ... Mail Merge is a farce, converting .doc to .rtf messes up fonts and formats, and nobody cares. If OO.o would fix a few things, I would never need to use Windoze again, but as it is, I simply must use MSO in my work (as a professional editor).
Sun sued Microsoft for 2 Billion dollars for ruining Java. However Sun put Java in the hands of Microsoft to enable them to bugger it alsmost completely. So they got 2 Billion. I suggested that they take the money and run. They could have shared it all with their employees as a nice Christmas bonus and just disappeared.
But no sooner they had 2 Billion Kodac suid Sun for 1 Billion. Easy come easy go.
Well back then why did Sun not take control of Java and write their own browser, leaving MS out in the cold? Beats me,
Well 1 Bill ain't much (is it?) Mmmm? Wasn't there a deal included not to sue each other for 10 years. Well at least that was public. Mmmmaybe there is something else going on. Sun has control over OO just enough to stifle the development just below that of anything really useful for business. Don't get me wrong OO is very useful to me. There are some things that are still very poor. Such as graphs in calc etc. and MS filters etc.
What? do they want to sell Star Office over Open Office. Somehow I do not think that that is really a big money spinner for Sun. So Why hold back OO?
MS do deals in such ways that I would say were illegal and on the verge of "Evil conspiring organization" stuff. Oh some say "that's business" But is business an excuse to forget morality? NO!
Anyway it would be great to be the Puppet Master of Sun (Not only Sun but lots of other organizations and lets say certain individuals), who do little favors for the Master who in turn grants them breath. (Otherwise "cut off their air supply")
Here the Master is able via many channels to stifle, bug up and generally make Linux (As a desktop System) slightly less attractive to the general end user. Other means are by making deals (Pulling Strings) with software houses to ignore Linux and only support the tight arsed (proprietry) operating systems. Mac plays along with this game also.
I am not surprised if certain individuals bug up certain OSS programs so they either break sightly or never are configured well. Who pulls their strings??? However there are still some individuals that believe that everyone needs to read the code or the poorly documented RTFM and still cower behind a 80x25 70's type terminal playing with stty. haha.
Is Sun stupid or not? They could have had it all with Java but they licensed it the wrong way. And even now they do not even support it well. 5 Years to get 64Bit jnlp. Crickey! There is no excuse. Cups printing breaks - 2 years to fix it.
I did not develop for developer.java.com simply because of their license. (They own my code) Apparently this is the same for OO.
What is Open Source? Is it Open Source or is it Stifle Source. It seems to me that not only Sun but many other companies are using Open Source as Stifle Source. Why has Apple bought CUPS? What about ghostscript (Always 2-5 years behind). Lots of examples of Stifle Source.
Lets not talk about hardware. Grrrrr!!
I guess that neither Java or OO are good money spinners for Sun now, so why should they care.
After all of this rant I do appreciate Sun open sourcing OO and Java (So Far). They have made many gestures to the Open Source community on one hand but on the other?
Open source is open slather for all sorts of skulduggery. Is there that much peer review? Are there that many developers. Who has time? We all have to eat and pay our mortgages, feed our screaming kids etc.
I do appreciate the heroes of the OSS community who put in a great deal of their time to write software for the community. A great form of charity. Thanks.
I do not appreciate companies trying to choke this great work. I do not appreciate individuals poisoning code.
Open Source is a great asset to the entire world. I cannot understand why it is still second best in Desktop and Business. It just is not polished as it should be.
KDE4 - Great coding, lousy usability.
Gnome - Great coding, usability good but not excellent.
Enlightenmment - Brilliant coding for 1997 - What h
While there are some good points about things that need fixing, it would be fine with me if new features did indeed slow down and they simply fixed it up to work right and then just a few devs left for maintainence.
Do we actually need more features? Microsoft keep putting more and more crap into Office that 0.001% of people in the world will use. They create a new shiny interface (urgh), but the basic apps are not so different from the old Office 3.1. Word is a word processes, Excel does maths and graphs, Powerpoint is used by managers who cant talk, Access is a poor mans db app.
Not saying that OO development can stop, but it certainly can slow down towards maintainence mode until we have an suite that works right and then only touch it as necessary. We dont need bells and whistles. We need something that just works.
One of the big problems in the dev world though is most devs dont like fixing bugs, they prefer to work on new features, screw the bugs and let someone else clean it up. As a PM for a software company i experience this with my devs. They are quite happy while we are building an app, but as soon as it comes to support and im hoping for volunteers, they all start looking for other projects and start pointing at each other.
PS: To those who live in a sheltered world - online office apps are not the way for the moment. Availability, cost (broadband is not available all over the world, and isn't cheap everwhere), and finally, when the program exists on my computer, i choose when to upgrade and if i want to upgrade, not dependent on the provider. I also own the software (screw what the EULA states).
Fwiw, I've been using Macs since 1984. I run a print publishing company. I used to work for big "content creation" companies like Omnicom and Time/Warner. And at this rate I figure I'll put up with about three more years of Mac OS whatever until there's some rough analogue of InDesign and Photoshop that actually works well on some open source OS and I'll be gone. But the one feature that would get me using another os just like that is a decent implementation of Windowshade. It worked like a dream back in the early nineties. It made it possible to work with literally several HUNDRED documents at a time. And OS X has nothing even close. I've tried three different third party windowshade apps and all three crashed my machine deader than Dr DOS.
Apple paid for a huge range of breathtaking work in interface design, much of it ignored by or openly fought by the supposedly sainted Steve Jobs. The Applesauce 3D document management interface, the various things that went to make up the Newton, and on and on and on. At this point I'm just grudgingly putting up with each new OS version and I get more impatient to switch to something else every year.
Apple, I loved you guys. I fought for you guys. But I'm so very ready to go.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
There are a hell of a lot more of us out there unwilling to use O.O than PHBs. My new laptop (an HP 2133) came with OO and I tried to actually use it. Silly me. The PDF converter crashed. The RTF converter created garbage. The text converter missed most of what was there. And this with files from several apps. This is kid's stuff here. It looks pretty enough but when I went to use it, it only worked to the level of a proof of concept. "Oooh! Look at what a cool programmer I am! I wrote a PDF converter!"
This isn't rocket science here, folks. I could be pretty happy with something that had the features of Wordperfect DOS circa 1988 or even Simpletext circa 1990. NotaBene circa 1995 would make me very happy indeed. But if a feature is there, it needs to actually work. The vibe I get instead is a piece of crap judged not by actually providing a trustworthy tool for users but rather as a series of project bullet points for Sun managers and programming exercises and resume items for coders.
Come back to me when the software actually works.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
You are a perfect example of why I don't take OO.o seriously. Look at your wording. "office slaves", "suits" Blah, blah, blah. Because only "secretaries" actually do trivial stuff like writing or analysis, while you're a (woo-hoo!) ENGINEER with your manly coding skills. As if you are somehow proving how superior you are in your contempt for, y'know, the actual intended users of the product.
I don't eat food by cooks who have contempt for what those eating it will taste. I don't wear clothes by people who have contempt for how their products will fit. I don't read books by writers who have contempt for their reading public. And ya know what? I've dealt with programmers from inside Adobe and DEC and HP and Apple and, yes, Microsoft who bloody well *loved* the tiny, "mundane" little problem they were spending years on. How can we get this line screen algorithm to better deal with heavier paper stock? How can we change this header to be more fault-tolerant for people using degraded documents? And so on. And you can see that love in the quality of their work.
If you hold the users of a feature in contempt then, frankly, I think that you should get the fuck off that part of the project. Because chances are your code will suck and it will look like the feature or bug has been addressed when, in reality, it has just morphed into a new problem.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
That would be great but who is going to take on the low coolness factor job of creating and maintaining that documentation?
I must admit, I'm curious, is there a reason that no school has been approached to help with this? There are people who are actually training to be technical writers and project managers out there and could really gain from time put in on a real, in-use project like OO.o. Seems to me like there should be some way to portion out some of these tasks to designated groups of students under some professor who can be persuaded to have some degree of investment in the project.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
I'm seriously curious, if this is the case, does the Mongolian government contribute to OO.o? Are there any Mongolian schools that do so? Or NGOs that are meant to address Mongolian concerns? Seems like this a rare case of OO.o having a chance to get help that will be judged by usability metrics, which sure sounds to me like a damned good thing.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
It's not the license that's holding it back, technically. It's that Open Office is one large stinking pile of complex code.
What needs to be done is modularizing (and perhaps moving most of these modules out of sun, into pure GPLv3 hosted outside sun, say sourceforge). Like:
libmsofficecrap (general ms office functionalities)
libwordformat (Word [.doc] in/out parsing)
libexcelformat (Excel in/out parsing)
libpowerpoint, etc.
libopendocument
and then perhaps:
liboffice for setting up the documents/sheets internally in memory, the layout engine etc, and import/export through the libwordformat, libopendocument etc.
By doing this, we could expect KDE developers to start using these libs and extending them, merging them with KOffice, and building an OOo compatible but Qt'ed interface.
We'd see Gnome people, perhaps funded by Novell, writing a pure gnome office suite based on these functionalities, creating a gtk/gnomish GnomeOffice.
Expect a decent amount of all millions of Windows programmers to create an MS Office look-a-like.
Expect the NeoOffice hackers to build a real Mac GUI-based office suite. I'd be surprised if not Apple would seriously start looking into buying/funding it.
OOo could still exist and act as a portable office suite, suitable for companies who want one unified office for all their platforms.
This is the only thing that could make the OOo project (and code) get hundreds of developers and boom in functionality. We've all seen what happened to KHTML when moved out as a stand-alone lib, WebKit, which is used on a shitload of systems and platforms, including mobile ditos.
But as long as Michael Meeks and Sun wants total control of this, they won't see this as an option, and they'll continue to whine about it until they finally drop it to die.
That's sad.
Just get f*cking real and create independent libraries that other could inherit functionalities from. You won't believe how much support and man power you'd get in a matter of weeks or months!
Uh, huh. So coders are "logically" available as volunteers but all those other folks are external factors who need to be paid to do as they're told and then go away.
Interesting mindset, methinks. Sound about like what I've seen out there in the programmer world.
So what would it take for the culture of F/OSS to change enough to actually think of those designers, human factors folks, writers, and so on as actual respected partners? I'm truly curious. 'cause I've known a few folks who have tried to help from those angles and they've usually gotten sick of being treated as "too girly" and therefore not really people to be respected or given any decisionmaking authority.
Obviously, I have an opinion here and equally obviously I think that what we're looking at is some combination of insecurity, misogyny, and homophobia by a culture that is still proud to maintain the habits and attitudes of typical insecure teenaged boys. Frankly, as a straight male techie with more credentials and experience than most of you put together, I'm damn sick of it. My other posts in this thread and others on open source have made that pretty clear. From what I've read the number of women going into technical fields is decreasing and has been for years. Wonder why that is?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
I agree wholeheartedly with your idea but wonder about where the best use of your time is. Would you be willing to use that time to convince a couple of other coders and or users to take the time to personally schedule appointments with the staff (real staff, not "constituent relations" drones) of local legislators and explain this all to them? It's easy to get a feel that government should do this. It's much harder to actually get the relevant government and school officials to agree. Getting journalists, local, non-tech section journalists to understand the relevance of this to, say, school funding is pretty damn important, too.
Personally, I would recommend printing out a couple of copies of this whole thread, all the way down to -1 comments, sitting down over beer with some friends, going over it comment by comment, and using it as a series of starting points to explaining all of this. I've been excerpting parts of recent /. threads and forwarding them for a while now.
Yes, we need more code. But it seems to me that there's a much higher multiplier, especially right now with every level of government deciding on stimulus measures for the next few years, to getting better understanding among the folks in government than in being one more coder.
And, yes, I am working with my local government on several projects related to this kind of thing.
Good luck.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Of course it is sick, NO ONE writes software for free. This is the big lie of open source. All participants have ulterior motives, get a better job, be seen as an expert (when in fact you are not), start a money loser and hope deep pockets will buy you out with a big pay day so you really did not work for free (Red Hat/JBoss). Once the money never comes the old operant conditioning kicks in and the extinction response is on its way. Bill Gates was right (as always) stop stealing software and pay for it! What about all the crippled enterprises that have bought all this half-ass ware? XP Programming where programmers rule, not managers, where schedules are impossible to predict (think about that one). The code is "too cheap to measure" like java: write once, debug forever. The worst thing a business can have is someone else's source code, they want a product that works and the support that goes with it. Sun has the been at the forefront of wrecking the IT industry with this disingenuous crap. Solaris lost on the desktop, it lost in the data center and is draining the American economy with the illusion of free ware. Scott McNealy is the anti-christ of IT. He sells the maxmimum of his stock as the SEC will allow while the stockeholders take it from behoind and his disatrous business model sucks equity doen the big unix hole. Here's the source code is a virtual 'F*ck You letter'. I learned that bitter lesson more than 15 years ago when a vendor called and asked where I wanted the 1 million plus lines of source code escrow to be delivered. I said the null file! The future is not whayt it used to be, blame Scott McNealy, but you'll have yo do it from outside the bars of his gated community. Gates beat him like a rented mule. Unix is a dead horse, dismount and bury it. Have fun "worling" form your linux desktop
ANYTHING Sun touches is the kiss of death. I mean, really. Can those dumbasses do ANYTHING right with open source. This isn't about developer stagnation with OpenOffice, it's developers staying away from it BECAUSE Sun has it's dirty little fingers in the pie. You never know what those idiots at Sun might pull.
Case in point: MySQL. Look at the fragmentation and the co-founders leaving since Sun bought them.
Pax Vobiscum
Is Base not crashing and the DOC importer in Writeer rendering files correctly a "feature add"?
Seriously. I've tried to move to OO on more than one occasion. I've been unable to because of issues like the ones above.
Last time I tried to copy a few rows and columns from calc and paste them into writer, I was expecting a table to be created and the data to be inserted. Instead I got an image.
Quite a mess honestly. In the end I uploaded the spreadsheet and text document to google docs and doing my copy and paste there and then downloading it and converting it back to open office.
user error? Probably. But I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to do it.
So what would it take for the culture of F/OSS to change enough to actually think of those designers, human factors folks, writers, and so on as actual respected partners?
I don't think the problem is any combination of "insecurity, misogyny or homophobia" but instead stems from the unscientific aspects of the work. If two programmers submitted a solution to a problem, how would you rate the superior solution? Well, computational algorithms can be tested. Performance can be measured.
If two artists submit their solution to an interface problem, how do you rate the superior solution? There certainly are ways to do so, but those tend to involve careful tests with a number of "regular" people. Typically, those kinds of studies cost money.
That doesn't mean there aren't ways to use OSS to help... Maybe someone could come up with a way to leverage social networking to improve interface testing. I dunno. I do know, however, that it often helps to have a singular vision--a Steve Jobs role--someone who is given the ultimate authority to say, "no, that's dreadful." Designs by committee tend to look like it.
Unlike projects by for profit organizations there's no need to continually create new versions of projects. Perhaps the dwindling developers is actually a great sign that the project has reached it's goals. Personally I think it works just fine and I can't think of any "new" feature creep I'd like to see added.
I know people who still use Word 5. Why? Because it was done. There wasn't a need for anything else. Maybe some bug fixes.
Are you using it?
Is it missing anything? (if you say yes... then you should really go add it.)
More or less, exactly what you pointed out :) -- you have to jump around through several different pages, sometimes branching through whole trees, to find out the properties and methods of one single object type. This is not easily discoverable. Sure, it's possible to find things out, but it's certainly not terribly easy nor fast. From a source code point of view, I can understand the reasons for listing which interfaces are implemented, but from an API perspective, why not include also the methods and properties themselves, all on the one page? That's easy enough to do with proper referencing and no need to duplicate content on the server, and keeps the reader from having to jump through so many hoops.
And, as you yourself note, in some cases the documentation doesn't even document things properly:
So again, it's possible, but neither easy nor fast. When I'm trying to get myself up to speed with either an API or a bunch of source code, the last thing I want to be doing is wasting time and energy due to poor organization of the docs.
In contrast to the maze of twisty passages that is the OOo documentation, let's look at Microsoft's documentation for the Selection object for MS Word, roughly similar in some ways to Writer's TextCursor. Here, we have all properties and methods listed on one page, with no need to click and click just to find the names of what properties and methods a Selection object has. As much as I quite dislike MS for how they conduct business, their documentation puts just about any FOSS project, and certainly OOo, to shame.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
both have lots of missing or hard to use, way in need of improvement features - just take the graphs in excel/calc. Can you do log scales that start stop at something other then a multiple of 10 ? (just in office 07).
sizing of graphs in excel ?
graphs with linked floating x axis (hint - if you are a programmer who want something that a bout a billion people will routinely use, adding multiple floating x axis to excel/calc is it)
all the comments about bloatware/"finished" software are a little off base - it is not that software gets finished, it is that it is harder to see what is important; take /code, we recently hve been getting lots of useless floating widgets, but login doesn't return you to where you were...
Notwithstanding the real issues presented in TFA, there are other forces at work here. The market for office suites themselves is stagnating. And programmers as a general rule like to code things that will actually be used by people.
The NaNoWriMo phenomenon sparked a significant exodus of creative writers away from office suites and into specialized novel- and story-writing tools. Similar migrations are underway in everything from screenwriting to song lyrics. Poets tend to regard grammar checkers as more of a curse than a blessing, and they don't typically need a powerful table system.
Meanwhile, a current version of Quicken does everything the typical home user might ever need to do in Excel, and specialized database tools like Delicious Library have obviated most home users' need for a more general database tool like Access.
Outside of the actual offices where these suites might still have a viable niche, people everywhere else are realizing that specialized, streamlined tools will often make them more productive and focused than a generalized suite swollen with features.
OO.o is just the baby in the office-suite bathwater. Maybe that baby is "sick", maybe it isn't...either way, it's on its way out the window.
Are you aware of any public commitment to ship a solver before it was clear that Kohei's would not be available to them ? AFAICS this duplication was just pure spite, and the excuse that it was on their roadmap (or whatever) was just that: pathetic. Can you point to anywhere that it was announced before OOoCon 2007 ? What does "fully licensed" mean ? it sounds nice, but what that means is some junk proprietary re-licensing right ? Anyhow - at least it puts the huge lie to the statement that "Copyright assignment is not a problem for anyone" - now it is all just blamed on Novell - but that's junk too - is it not obvious that making the need to trust Sun step #1 in contributing to OO.o is a huge put-off ?
It is interesting that people equate the FSF's motives and ethics with Sun's - would you feel equally happy with assigning rights to a large corporation, on the rocks financially, and with a close relationship with Microsoft - to assigning them to the FSF ? I would suggest not.
Michael Meeks again voices this Novell vs. Sun fight. This time in the public. How sad!
Another point, I would like to make: What about the hundreds of regular contributors to OpenOffice?
- Over 2000 active and voluntary bug reporters
- Over 100 active language groups (http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html) translating the application, building spellchecking libraries, thesaurus (e.g. Openthesaurus.org), and grammar checker (languagetool.org).
- Hundreds of active extension developer (http://extensions.services.openoffice.org)
- much voluntary work done in writing manuals.
In total, this is NOT a sick project. The NOVELL vs. Sun problems need to be sorted out, but not this way, Michael! In one point, I agree, SUN should rethink their lincencing of Open/StarOffice.
I think the word-counting is important in English-speaking countries (only?).
In another areas one counts in characters - with or without spaces is a question - or even A4-pages.
I actually am a technical writer, and I like it. Now that I have been working in the field for a while, I'm chary about getting involved with F/OSS projects because the F/OSS community in general tends to treat non-programmers as not worth bothering with or listening to, even though a lot of us who'd really like to get involved are working professionals with good track records. I don't need to get treated like shit and ignored on a volunteer project when, if I get treated like shit and ignored in the corporate world, I'm at least drawing a paycheque. (Nothing eats like food, after all.)
I've seen far too much of the attitude around that programmers should write the documentation, because the programmers know the application best (as if that's a particularly good criterion by which to create documentation!), and IME that really only accomplishes two things: It makes your programmers (who'd rather be programming, quelle surprise) cranky, and it pisses off your user base, when the documentation reads like something that has been hacked together by someone who doesn't know the first thing or care a whit about documentation. Brilliant.
Now, if someone were serious about getting technical writing students involved in F/OSS projects, I'd recommend contacting these folks: Cooperative Education and Career Services at the University of Waterloo, and the Rhetoric and Professional Writing and Rhetoric and Communication Design programme people. They do co-ops at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in those programmes, and, at least when I was there, seem to be quite open to unconventional project ideas...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Instead of what Symphony IS, Symphony should have started with Lotus SmartSuite On Steriods. SmartSuite is old code, but if IBM had "Open Sourced" (to make a verb) SmartSuite's parts that IMB unequivocally owns and asked geeks/nerds/devs to restore non-IBM-owned/patented functionality they could try but not the code of, then SmartSuite would equal what OO.o has, and then could have surpassed OO.o by now.
I still use Lotus SmartSuite, in vista, in VirtualBox, in Mandriva. I used to use it in a Mandriva/Win4Lin combo. SmartSuite opens fast, is compact, has non-modal dialog boxes, has nice colors, better WYSIWYG than either ms office OR OO.o.... Best of all, it has the *award-winning* (well, late ~~80s to early 90s) Lotus Approach database. Approach and 1-2-3 and Word Pro can share data, too. Unfortunately, Lotus dropped the ball and lost market share, and IBM picked them up, and didn't foresee or didn't CARE that OO.o was coming along.
Such a sad and almost outrageous state of affairs...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I don't get it. Every government in the world should be interested in spending $10M on 24 developers and let them develop and maintain OO.
Collectively, governments have poured billions into MS, so a few millions on an open source alternative will not hurt their tax payers.
So get it out of Sun, have 5 governments pour $2M each per year to developers. Done. The developers have a job for life if that is their wish. Governments and the rest of the world will have an office suite. Forever. Amen.
This is de-volution, not evolution.
Office 2007 :
Not suprisingly Big Corporate(tm) accounts are still buying Office 03 along with their XP licences.
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
It would have been better to forge a "brave new world" by ditching the qwerty keyboard for a rational one.
OOo is quite healthy. However, Novell seems to be profoundly sick: They arent even keep their employees in line.
Your proof by assertion is substantially un-convincing. What line should employees be in ? read the disclaimer at the bottom of my blog: this is my point of view as a long time OO.o contributor. Can you substantiate any of the big problems you allege in go-oo - I'd love to help fix them - I am not aware of any. Is it really negative PR to point out a serious problem that afflicts us all, and ask people to help fix it ? how about showing the growth of Linux contribution - is that negative PR for Open Source ? - there is some kick-ass success happening there to emulate: why does Linux succeed and grow where OO.o shrinks ? you know my answer - what is yours ?
Either that, or its just incompetence.
Hey ho - mindless, incompetent rants - more than likely, but ones actually backed by data: if you can't play the ball try the man instead - sometimes he is softer. My data set is public, as are the scripts to generate it - be my guest: point to the error in the analysis.
Nearly every paragraph in the "article" begins with a disclaimer that the data (and/or the analysis) are flawed ...
So - you really should read more than the first few paragraphs. Try the 'Activity Graphs' section:
Extending this metric to the entire project we see perhaps a more interesting picture
My conclusion:
So, it should be clear that OO.o is a profoundly sick project
Clear? Clear based on all those assertions they made about their data being dodgy? Yeah, umm, ok.
I'm sorry, but this is article is very hard to take seriously.
is hedged with equivocation to be sure, with extensive and clearly labeled caveats. Having said that by processing the noisy data we get a meaningful signal out of it I argue - the data is available if you want to reproduce it, and as yet there is no published analysis of it that I'm aware of that looks any different. The underlying reality should be clear. Given that I use the same metric on the Linux kernel - and the comparison shows a huge gap in terms of growth and activity I hope people can make up their own minds; seriously or otherwise. Better still - people can help fix the problem by getting involved in OpenOffice development - that is my hope at least.
Took a long time to find it myself.
See the Circle in the upper left corner. Click it and a menu will appear that includes print. Call me crazy but the circle seems less intuitive then clicking the word File.
"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget." -Thomas Szasz
Kklein, Hater of free software and lover of M$. Definitly will become a M$ attack bot like willyhill, macthorpe, dedazo, jwilcox154, Alex Belits, westlake and numerous other accounts.
--
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends do help M$ addicted friends to commit suicide.
To be honest: No, because I wouldn't be anonymous anymore ;-).
Nice - so you say we have a load of bugs, but you don't want to tell us what they are ? the Coward title you hide behind is perhaps well chosen. Please file your bugs in an appropriate way. If we are chucking un-verifiable allegations around, I will infer from your reticence that you work for Sun, shame on you for hiding that.
Novells Cowboy Coders might be successful in hacking minor features on the OOo codebase. However: they add instabilities and bugs because these "small hacks" arent sufficiently designed, documented and tested
Give some examples of such instabilities and bugs please. Perhaps they are worse than some of the amusing howlers in Sun's OO.o 3.0 - lets see.
having this kind of development in the core elements of OOo would render the codebase unusable in a few years (yes, the current code quality is bad - so everything possible should be done to raise to quality, and rotting the code further should be avoided)
Ah - this is definitely a Sun developer talking, and yes the code quality is pathetic in places - but it is amusing that your "everything possible" excludes the inclusion of a large volume of new code re-writing and fixing the older more broken code, even at the expense of the occasional regression.
Yes, they where communicated to the Novell guys. I cant go into specifics, because I wouldn't be anon in the OOo microcosmos anymore.
So - thinking back over the last year and the (non-)communication of bugs I can think of perhaps a single instance here which is basically a mis-understanding. This also suggests that you work in the writer team; as a brief example of the outstanding engineering going in there, I personally love things like the comment in calcmove.cxx:
Workaround for inadequate layout algorithm: suppress invalidation and calculation of position, if paragraph has formatted itself at least STOP_FLY_FORMAT times and has anchored objects. Thus, the anchored objects get the possibility to format itself and this probably solve the layout loop.
Please do drop me a mail: michael.meeks@novell.com with your patch, and we'll try to get it included in ooo-build - and sorry that you got screwed over by the process barrier: you're by no means the first. Thanks for at least trying - that alone makes you a hero in my book.
SUN making Free Software is a hype to take more free programmers!
Solaris is a crap and needs to desapear forever!