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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
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
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.
What more do you want them to add. The rest of the stuff Microsoft has, no one cares about enough to add it.
That viewpoint, I believe, is one that limits open source's potential. Just because a developer does not find a feature useful does not mean a broader user community feels the same way. When they find features they need lacking in an OSS package they simply stick with the existing closed alternative.
Having a small developer community acerbates this problem, since it's less likely one of them would also want some feature that the others find unnecessary.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
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 true at all. Sure, you can type stuff in, mark some stuff bold, spell check it, and print it out -- but there's no need for an office suite to do that, and if that's all you intend to do don't call yourself an office suite.
Here's something I ran into yesterday. There's a "Compare Documents" feature under the Edit menu. It doesn't compare the contents of tables. The bug reporting this was opened in July 2003, and nobody has seemed to care yet. In 2007, someone had a patch, which was committed and not added to the next release's codeline because "I don't think that this issue fulfills the criteria for 2.3.1". This may it was retargeted for 3.1 and rejected in November because There are too many open questions to finish in 3.1." People complained again in 2004 and 2008; I don't think you can say in good faith that "no one cares enough".
It occurs to me that your exact phrasing was "no one cares enough to add it", which is completely right. Nobody cares enough to develop OpenOffice.org to where it should be.
If you ask what more, are they not done, then I'll ask the same thing about the Linux kernel -- isn't it done? What benefit is there to running the latest 2.6.28 or whatever instead of 2.4, which worked fine for everyone a few years ago? But yet who in their right mind would (all other things being equal) set up a new system with 2.4 instead of some kernel released this year? And you'd laugh if I suggested the Linux 1.x tree, but that can open and close programs and files just as well as any other OS, can't it?
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.
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."
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.
...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?
Nearly every paragraph in the "article" begins with a disclaimer that the data (and/or the analysis) are flawed/biased/incomplete/not useful/meaningless!
Honestly, that's usually a plus to me. It means the author actually understands what good data is, and how one extracts meaning from data. 98% of humanity would have run reports like that, called it definitive, and you probably would have never noticed the difference.
Never confuse confidence with competence, or frankness with weakness. Imperfect data, honestly presented, is much better than no data.
As rough as his numbers are, they are reasonable support to his conclusions. If somebody disagrees with his conclusions, the burden is now on them to come up with better numbers, and Meeks has even shown them several opportunities to do that.
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."
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."