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.'"

Comments

But isn't that the idea?

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Firehed]

Maybe in terms of feature-completeness, but IMO Microsoft really did Office 2007's new UI really well (though I certainly see why some people would hate it). My understanding of the Ribbon was that their goal was to expose functionality that's always existed but was hidden too deep to ever be of use - and they certainly did that. Plenty will call it pointless eye candy, but I for one consider it a huge step forward in usability for a product that I too had long considered finished.

Maybe adding in additional features to OO.o would be bloat. Honestly, I don't use any word processors often enough to say (though it handled what I needed the last time I used it). But speeding it up and polishing the UI could go a long way in any software, and twice as much in OpenOffice.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Opportunist]

Then maybe you can answer me one question, and it's a honest one, I couldn't find it: How do you print in MSO 2007?

Not Interesting

[countach]

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.

Re:Not Interesting

[Dr_Barnowl]

Exactly.

My wife often asks me for help with Office, on the general principle that I'm the computer geek, and she isn't. But I probably know less about the features of office suites than she does ; I certainly use them less.

I sometimes use spreadsheets to make a few calculations. I use Word when I have to fill in some piece of red tape that's a Word form.

I've donated many hours of my time to tools that make my life easier - almost entirely selfishly, because if I donate my patches and features, I don't have to maintain a separate version for myself.

I don't use an office suite enough to care though, and I suspect the same is true of the majority of programmers, which means that it's likely that to get someone to write code for OOo, you have to pay them, and also that they are not in a position to pick and choose their projects, which likely means that they are probably not as good as say, kernel developers, who almost certainly enjoy the geek thrill of getting cool new hardware working smoothly.

Re:It's 2009

[Daengbo]

I read the article yesterday and said "Duh!" Everyone has known that OO.o was a screwed up project since it was open sourced. Very few commits have come from outside Sun -- the requirements to dual-license contributions and the messy code base from when it was closed deter people from getting involved.

The statistics in the article are interesting, but its conclusion isn't:

• Sun has always been the major contributor to OO.o.
• Sun is controlling of the project.
• Sun is now hurting and people claim heading into bankruptcy.
• OO.o is now in big trouble.

Anyone who has been following the project knows what's up. It's just sad that OO.o gave people the impression that other office projects (which could have flourished in the time people were using OO.o) weren't very important. I'm looking at Gnome Office and KOffice.

I almost never use OO.o, though, because I do almost everything in Google Docs or Latex.

p.s. Of course, Meeks is promoting Novell's Go-oo, so people can claim he has too much bias to be an accepted critic.

"Finished" software

[Cillian]

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)

Novell "profoundly sick"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Too complex

[mlwmohawk]

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?

Re:That's because there DONE!

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

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?

Re:It's 2009

[ta bu shi da yu]

I'll let you make up your own mind:

1. Kohei's story
2. Sun rebuttal by Mathias Bauer.

Sun has a history of not playing nicely with other projects, however. A real culture of "not invented here", or just plain arrogance. Makes me wonder what's going to happen to MySQL.

Re:It's 2009

[ta bu shi da yu]

P.S. In case you think that Bryan Cantrill quote is made up, check it out yourself on Google groups:

1. Original message
2. Cantrill's reply
3. Hilarious response by David Miller
4. Miguel de Icaza astounded response

Correct: MS apps are all kludges

[Kupfernigk]

Microsoft has built a business out of bad design which happens to fit the sloppy thinking and training of office workers.

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.

Why I didn't contribute to OOo

[Qwavel]

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.