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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.'"
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?
How likely is that conspiracy theory? I mean does *anybody* actually own Star Office? And if they did, what feature could it possible have that Open Office doesn't? In fact other than worthless bloat what does OO.o lack period? Microsoft Office finished in 98 or so, and just adds bloat. OO.o is to that point now.
There's such a thing as finished software.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
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.
Do users really need an open source desktop suite when they can meet their needs using a server based suite? Broadband is cheap.
But it's not ubiquitous. For some of us, broadband access is not available at work.
In addition, in some cases, what we are working on needs to be kept secure and not broadcast over broadband.
The ability to pull out a laptop and do real work, without having to try to connect to a server to gain access to productivity tools, is valuable to alot of users
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Yes.
Do users really need an open source desktop suite when they can meet their needs using a server based suite?
I don't like being beholden to an always-on internet connection, availability, and continued business success of a remote host than I like being beholden to Microsoft's dedication to backwards compatibility. I want an office suite and a document format that I'll be able to use for 10 years, or 20.
Indeed that is a problem that affects OpenOffice since it's inception. To make matters worse, it's recent migration from a 2.0 to 3.0 was apparently made with a conscious decision to keep the code as unlearnable and unwriteable as it was. You can't have a flourishing developer community if your project purposely obscures the code.
Moreover, you don't make many friends or any inroads if you manage a project in such a way that you expect volunteers to contribute their work for free in such a way that a company keeps the rights to that code and incorporates it in a proprietary product while the original developer gets squat.
Having said that, let's not forget other FLOSS MS-Office clones out there such as KOffice. It would be nice to compare the community participation.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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.
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.
Well, using the desktop suite means that you fully control the access to your documents. On the other hand, a "server-based suite" like Google's forces you to relinquish the control of your documents to a third party, which means that you explicitly give vital information on your business to an external party subject to the control of a foreign country. Having economic espionage fresh in the collective memory, including ECHELON, that is a very dumb thing to do.
So yes, users do really need an open source desktop suite, no matter how cheap broadband is at the moment. It's all about control.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
This is a problem for all open source projects. Once any project gets above a certain size, it becomes difficult for casual developers to make contributions. This is why open source and UNIX grew so well together - the UNIX philosophy was to have simple tools doing one thing well. Individuals can make useful additions to a simple tool, and the simple tools can be combined into powerful systems.
You make a comparison to X11, and that's probably quite apt. One of the big changes in X.org has been splitting the project into a large number of smaller ones, and this has allowed casual contributors to start making a difference once again.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Sun requires commits be dual-licensed so that Sun can use the code in the commercial version, Star Office. That's how they control
Of course, anyone can fork, and they have. Novell has Go-oo (which Meeks is silently promoting in this article), IBM has Symphony, and there's NeoOffice for Mac.
Nothing was stopping anyone from forking XFree86, either, and they did. Xorg lives on and XFree86 is for all intents and purposes dead.
Sun is going to control OO.o right into the grave.
Put identity in the browser.
If they had done that without obscuring an equal amount of useful features that were previously perfectly accessible, like oh say Print, then maybe it would have been worth it. I'm glad you like it, but roughly 100% of users I've talked to find the new design utterly infuriating. And it's not just a matter of getting used to it, I'd say.
The talent MS has for causing human suffering through user interface is truly breathtaking. Then again, these are the cursed ones who gave birth to the demon clippy, so who's surprised?
Facebook is the new AOL
OpenOffice is a bit too big and too important to be under the copyright of millions of different people.
Sure, because that held Linux back.
Novell is trying to hijack the OOo-brand with their own fork and so far that isnt going to well. So I guess Michael Meeks needs scapegoat and Sun is an easy target.
No arguments there.
Put identity in the browser.
Yeah, that's perfectly obvious, a big glowing yellow MS logo orb for print. Nobody could figure that old File menu out.
Facebook is the new AOL
The parent may have hit on one reason why there are so few people working on OO.o. As far as most people are concerned, it's complete and doesn't need improving beyond a few bug fixes.
Most programmers probably don't spend a huge amount of time with word processors, and when they do it's just with the basic features to bash out a letter or some documentation. OO.o and various other free suites can do that just fine, so why invest time and effort that could be spent elsewhere on more pressing problems?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
>your project purposely obscures the code.
Interesting allegation, but could you be more specific?
There are literally thousands of problems with your scenario, and zero with ASCII. Try again.
Nice bit of bait and switch there. To answer the question PROPERLY you would have to say YES Linux was held back from making the switch to GPLv3. Nowhere in the world is it v3 because of the licensing wording. The OP wasn't saying the code was held back but the switch of license was.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Great link. In reading Sun's response I have to wonder, what kind of open source project is worried about "stealing code". There is no stealing code. You contribute to an open source project and then other people work on it. Layer upon layer. I think there may be a culture conflict going on here and Sun and OO is not going to be meaningfully open source as long as long it is under Sun almost exclusively.
a document format that I'll be able to use for 10 years, or 20.
ASCII
EBCDIC
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Yes, because users should learn a programming language to typeset a document.
Leave the basement for a while and take a look around the real world.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Oh what a fool I am! Of course, how could I miss it? After all, for decades we have been trained to click on the big flashy MS logo and expect something sensible happen. It's been that way in IE... erh, no. In Windows ... erh, no. In any Office version before 2007 ... erh, no. In ... fuck, in ANY program?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"These people are INCREDIBLY picky about how their word, excel, etc documents look. "
No shit. That's their job. They don't have a reason to care about anything other than results.
Change does not serve them.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You are the one who is shitting. I had to go find an example on google images.
Never in a million years would I have even thought to click on that thing. If I would have had the idea that it might be clickable, I would expect it to open a browser window to the Office home page or something equally useless. Apparently lots of people are shitting you.
http://mahoneylibrary.wordpress.com/2007/09/06/ms-office-2007-on-library-lab-computers/
http://mahoneylibrary.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/office07crop.thumbnail.png
" What fucking moron changed the FILE menuitem to a glowing office logo?
What raging idiot thinks that's intuitive? Only retarted morons, that's who. "
That would be the same fucking morons | raging idiots who put "shut down" under "Start"
The central issue seems to be that in addition to being LGPL-licensed, Sun require all contributions to have a Joint Copyright Assignment agreement.
Here's the rub. Kohei *quite clearly* knew about this requirement when he started off. There seems to have been no sign in the interim that Sun would change their stance. Yet he says:-
Long story short, I joined Novell [who] decided to pick me up. When Novell asked me whether I would be willing to change the license of the Solver code to LGPL only, I simply agreed.
Well... why? He already knows that Sun require the JCA before accepting contributions, and that accepting Novell's change would make this impossible unless *they* were willing to change their minds. But then why ask in the first place? Novell's behaviour here is either very cynical or incompetent.
The change in licensing made perfect sense since the entire code was owned by myself (~99%), with a small fraction contributed from Novell and Debian, under LGPL.
Normally I'd agree, but since the code was written for submission to OO.o which only accepts contributions with the JCA, it makes no sense at all.
I'm well aware that some people are going to kneejerk-interpret (and respond to) this post as if it's a blanket defence and/or endorsement of Sun's overall behaviour surrounding OO.o. No, it's not.
What I *am* saying is that whether or not *we* think the JCA is reasonable (and I'm personally dubious about it), Kohei knew that it was required when he started his module and went ahead anyway. Yet he later agreed to Novell's license change knowing (or he should have known) that this would make it impossible to meet those requirements.
Sun might or might not be dicks, and that Summer of Source incident might have been an intentional blow off, but they at least appear to have been consistent and clear on what the terms of acceptance were. Seems Kohei knew this when he started but later agreed to an incompatible license change anyway. His choice, but I've no idea why and I don't see how he can complain about this.
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Actually, yes, it has been in Windows for a long time - since Win95. You just probably don't notice that Windows logo on the "Start" button anymore :)
By the way, the logo on the "pearl" (which is what MS calls that big round button) is not that of MS - it's that of Office. So the button is directly analogous to Windows "Start"; as I understand, this is, in fact, the intent - it's like "Start" for Office, from which all other actions may be reached. It's also more obvious on Vista, where the usual "Start" is also round, and is roughly of the same size.
On the whole, though, I don't see the point of the complaint. Yes, UIs do change sometimes as they evolve. In this case, the change had been, on the whole, a positive one (from personal experience - I used to hate Office2007 badly when it was just released, because of the Ribbon, but when I got used to it eventually, I actually liked it).