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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Thats FUD. There is essentially no difference between StarOffice and OOo. Star Office is just an alternative model to offer services to customers for Sun (sometimes organizations have budget for licenses, but not for services).

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Tatarize]

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.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[MichaelSmith]

I mean does *anybody* actually own Star Office?

According to the article:

Distance the project from Sun: perhaps less branding, certainly less top-down control, reduce the requirement to 'share' all your rights over to Sun before you can contribute to the project. Better still, share ownership of the code with a non-profit foundation to guarantee stability and an independent future for the code-base.

...Sun owns open office.

There's such a thing as finished software.

Yes.

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?

[GreatBunzinni]

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.

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?

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Computershack]

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?

You're shitting me...See the big fucking round button on the top left corner with the office logo on? When you click on it, a menu comes up with file and print functions....

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Lorien_the_first_one]

It seems like Sun is licensing a lot of their stuff under the GPL. I agree with the comments concerning the licensing issue. If Sun wants to be the maintainer, that's fine. Let them make it like Red Hat does: work with GPL, insert company branding and lead the project with proper maintenance. Dual licensing doesn't seem to meet the needs or the interests of the developers. Removing the requirement for developers to give ownership of the code to Sun would attract more developers to tackle the bugs, clean up the code with better organization and documenation, and let developers know that their code is still their code. As far as I can tell, dual licensing the code for OO hasn't worked out too well other than that we do get a fairly good free office suite. Simplifying the project by using just the GPL would very likely be the change they need to make to take care of the complaints.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Sigma 7]

How do you print in MSO 2007?

ALT-F, P. Or, click on Office icon in top-left corner, click on print...

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[paimin]

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?

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Daengbo]

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.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[paimin]

Yeah, that's perfectly obvious, a big glowing yellow MS logo orb for print. Nobody could figure that old File menu out.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[hairyfeet]

Until KOffice has a NATIVE Windows port I doubt you will be hearing much more about them even if OO.o ends up in the toilet. That was one of the nice things about OO.o, that I could hand it out on a nice freeware CD and folks could install it just as easy as any other Windows app and have a usable free office suite. I was just hoping that it would improve, because for me OO.o has always been slower and more unwieldy than my MS Office 2K. But when I tried OO.o 3.0 it seems to have gotten even slower than the 2.xx!

If I need to whip off a doc I don't want to wait 20-30 seconds just to have the GUI open and go through bursts where I type and nothing shows up on the screen for several seconds and then it all just pours out, which is what I experience with OO.o. And while folks here like to point out the high cost of MS Office I simply doubt that most users are paying retail. I picked up my MS Office 2K Pro for around $50 years ago and I got MS Office 2K3 for free from school. But I do hope that someday they come out with a native KOffice just so there is competition and I'll be able to give my customers choice with my FOSS CD. But the second you start talking about Cygwin or having to install the entire KDE underpinnings just to get KOffice you have lost 99% of the Windows users out there. And like it or not, Windows still commands the lion's share of the world's desktops.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[AmiMoJo]

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?

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[MrZaius]

>your project purposely obscures the code.

Interesting allegation, but could you be more specific?

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Matthieu Araman]

I find it funny that openoffice is in the situation mozilla was some years ago...
- big code which takes time to clean up (There was some presentation made by an openoffice guy which explained all the work they have been doing to remove old code, factorize code, clean up...)
- mostly contributors from one company, slow to gain external contributors
- hard for external contributors as some stuff are naturally "inside"
- patches sitting and not being integrated
- need to release stuff and at the same time work on more architectural stuff
- work needed on tools to ease distributed contribution and extension stuff

the only difference is that as a product openoffice.org 3.0 is much more a success than early mozilla version so that should help drive developpers overcome the other problems...

I think some of the above problems seems to have been partly adressed but as the number of sun developpers decrease, it complicate integration of needed new developpers...

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[PietjeJantje]

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

Oh there are pros and cons. The disadvantage is all the sweet from Common User Access guidelines is lost.

But that is not what the ribbon is all about. The ribbon is just another product cycle. The problem with WIMP is that basically, just as 20 years ago, you click an icon to start an application (etc.), and nothing has changed except looks. So Apple comes and goes with the dock and MS now entertains us with the ribbon. But it's all the same thing. Its only true purpose is to sell "next gen" which incorporates the new shiny. Is it better? That remains to be seen. Usually not (see dock).

Personally I would never mind it as an option, but in reality it is now a mess and with each app you have to check whether it's ribbon or not, if menus are available or not, and how the ribbon, if there, is implemented. That's worse than any single method, such as the consistent CUA.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Klivian]

Native KOffice for Windows and Mac are already exist, they are in beta just as the native X11 variant.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[penix1]

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.

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.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Chapter80]

Exactly! Print is hidden! How stupid!

The Properties are hidden too! (Personally, I take issue with Microsoft's logic that they are going to embed hidden properties (specifically, Title, Author, and Company name) in a place that they can't easily be found, so that when I post a document (or send it to someone), it can't easily be anonymous.) Now that I have found Properties, I routinely check it on documents sent to me, as it's always a source of entertainment, especially on Resumes.

For the record, Properties are conveniently located under "Windows Orb / Prepare" of all places!

... or how about the "Find" button. Holy shit, I have spent cumulative HOURS looking for that in each Microsoft Ribbon product, BECAUSE IT MOVES AROUND! In MS Word, it's on the Home tab, under Editing (but if the window is maximized then it appears to the right listed *separately*. If it's not maximized, then you have to click on "Editing" to discover it.

Oh, but in Outlook, in the Inbox display, I see "Find" under the "Edit" menu item (not sure why I don't see a ribbon, but I am thankful). Until I want to read an email - then the Ribbon appears, and "Find" is hidden to the right. This time, it's on the "Message" Tab, on a "Find" button, not an "Editing" Button as it was in Word... Until you press Reply. Then it's GONE. Of course, it's now moved so that it's under the "Format Text" tab under an "Editing" button.

But wait, there's more: In Excel, it's on the "Home" tab, under "Editing", "Find and Select". Intuitive!

Don't get me started about Excel. Want to insert a row? Oh there's an "Insert" tab - let's look there. Our options are..."Pivot Table", "Table", "Picture", "Clip Art", "Shapes", "SmartArt", "Column", "Line", "Pie", "Bar", "Area", "Scatter", "Other Charts", "Hyperlink", "Text Box", "Header & Footer", "WordArt", "Signature Line", "Object", and "Symbol". Is ANY ONE OF THOSE used more than INSERT A ROW??? NO!

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?

Turns out "Insert a Row" is not on the "Insert" Tab! How intuitive! It's on the "Home" tab! Brilliant! And it's under "Cells / Insert". ("Cells Insert" can insert cells, sheet, sheet rows and sheet columns.) Clearly something is mislabeled: "Cells/Insert Cells" vs. "Cell/Insert Sheet Rows" makes no sense (that is, if inserting rows belongs under "Cells", then clearly it belongs under "Insert Cells" as well.)

Want to change the "Format" of an email that you're about to send? Change the "Format" from Plain Text to HTML? Clearly that'd be on the "Format Text" tab. ooooooh no. it's not. It's on the "Options" Tab, under "Format". Why would "Format" not be on the "Format Text" tab? What the hell!???? (probably no room for it there, because "FIND" is taking up space)

Who organized this shit? Usability experts my ass!

</rant>

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Opportunist]

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?

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Opportunist]

Hell, how do you think they'll sell some "Microsoft Certified Office User" course if you could figure it out by yourself?

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Seraphim_72]

To add a little icing to that cake I can tell you that your school paid for that copy of Office for you, all you paid was for the shiny CD/DVD it came on. Admittedly they get a great cut from the retail price, but they still paid money for it. Lastly something the GP misses entirely is that he (and perhaps you) have never read the EULA for your copy. Though long, boring and wordy there is a reason it is called a 'student' copy of Office. To shorten it up for you, never type up something official on it, like a document for work or a legal anything, do either in any form and you have broken the license. So much as writing your accountant about your taxes on it with a spreadsheet of your monthly cable bill is enough to break it. In short it was made to write papers for class on, that is all.

Sera

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[IICV]

I do tech support at a small company, and most of the people there have never seen the ribbon interface before. For some reason, I can usually find stuff in it faster than they can, even though I've used MSO for a total of maybe two years and most of them have been using some version of MSO for their entire professional lives. I'm doing tech support for them, so I guess this is my job, but it was astonishing to me how I could figure out where the functionality they wanted was in a few seconds, after they'd been scratching their heads for minutes. These are intelligent people, not the sort of users that just memorize a couple of clicks; in fact, they're perfectly capable of figuring out most other software. It seemed like the Ribbon UI wasn't leveraging their experience with the old UI at all - rather, I got the impression that the ribbon paradigm was entirely at right-angles to what they expected, like it required a different mode of thought that they did not have but for some reason I do.

Of course, when I had that thought, it became clear to me what was going on. I'm sure Microsoft did acceptance testing for this new interface, with focus groups and all that, but it seems to me that they missed something. Fundamentally, in order to use the ribbon properly, you need to think like a programmer and not a normal user. I don't know why this happens, but from my experience (the plural of anecdote is data, after all :) ) I've found that people in more programming oriented areas have less trouble with the ribbon than everyone else.

Maybe this is just confirmation bias or something, but the fact remains that almost everyone in the company wishes we had 2k3.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[b4dc0d3r]

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

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[tomhudson]

" 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"

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Enderandrew]

No it isn't. If you don't agree to hand over copyright to your code to Sun, then it won't be included in OOo. The reason they must own the copyright is so they can decide if they want to include it solely in Star Office, and not OpenOffice at their discretion.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Toonol]

I haven't used 2007, but my son (Physics/Chem major, very computer literate) was telling me he used it for the first time at college, and had a difficult time figuring out how to print. It sounds like a design flaw, not the incompetence of the users.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Stormx2]

I know it's different, but it is akin to the old File menu. The new Ribbon interface has casualties for the sake of simplicity. The interface is GREATLY improved. They could have put the old "File" functions (new, open, save, print) in a ribbon, but they're too important. It makes SENSE. It takes all of 10 seconds to realise and grasp. I normally hate microsoft, I'm a faithful ubuntu user, but they got office 2007 right! it's one of the best pieces of software around.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[houstonbofh]

" 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"

It is accurate... You "Start" to "Shut Down" and then leave. Finishing the shutdown takes half an hour...

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Haeleth]

Because "File" is just so intuitive. What could be more obviously related to printing than a word that originally referred to the act of storing paper in a cabinet, and now instead has come to refer to storing bytes in a virtual cabinet? Grandma was certainly going to guess that her printer is related to "filing". Not.

Meanwhile, power users continue to use the keyboard shortcuts to print, instead of wasting time with the mouse. And the keyboard shortcuts remain the same. Microsoft understands muscle memory where it matters. For mouse users, it doesn't matter, because they're already working inefficiently.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Haeleth]

I'm sure glad Microsoft wanted to make the less-used options more visible, but at the same time they made the most-used options less visible. Atleast IMHO.

YHO is worthless compared to the resources Microsoft poured into actual tests with a wide variety of real users. They found that the most-used option was "Paste". Guess what the first and biggest button on the default ribbon is?

Printing is by no means a universal action, now that documents are increasingly transferred electronically and read on screen; and even where a document is printed, it's usually printed once when the document is finished, whereas pretty much all other commands are used repeatedly while the document is being composed.

I can't believe I'm defending the interface to a program I despise and refuse to use, but there you are. For the people it's aimed at, Word 2007 is actually quite well designed. Don't like change? Deal with it. Change happens, and you can keep up or you can be left behind.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Blakey Rat]

Bullshit. Apple gave up around when Quicktime 3.0 Player came out, and had that hideous metal-brushed appearance to it with completely non-standard widgets. They were pretty good all though the Classic OS period, but since OS X came out, Apple hasn't even *written down* most of the mysterious hazy interface guidelines they're using. For example, find documentation that explains when to use the brushed metal theme compared to the Aqua theme... it's not there. Apple uses it for purposes so completely random, it's utterly inscrutable.

Sadly, Microsoft took that crown from Apple around the time Windows XP SP2 came out. Windows has been more consistent, interface-wise, than OS X for a very long time.

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[Bert64]

Is there not a printer icon on the ribbon? OO.o certainly has one on the default toolbar.

What could be more obviously related to printing than a word that originally referred to the act of storing paper in a cabinet

You say this in a sarcastic manner, but it's true, you have to print it out before you can file it away in a cabinet...

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[ericlondaits]

> man winword

Re:But isn't that the idea?

[shutdown -p now]

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?

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).

That's because there DONE!

[John Sokol]

What more do you want them to add.
The rest of the stuff Microsoft has, no one cares about enough to add it.

Re:That's because there DONE!

[arotenbe]

How about fixing some of the 12058 open bugs?

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:That's because there DONE!

[slugtastic]

Heres OO.o ToDo Page. Found some interesting things there.

Re:That's because there DONE!

[ivoras]

There are, in fact, two kinds of users of OpenOffice.org (as with all software): those who just want to create a letter in the default Times New Romsn 12 font with formatting done with tabs and spaces or fill out a form somebody else created, and those who really need to create complex documents not because it's a source of endless fun but because they need to present complex topics.

For the first people, yes, OpenOffice.org is "done" - but for such people WordPad, KOffice and AbiWord are "done" also, and using OpenOffice.org is just bloat in terms of startup time and memory consumed.

For the second people, OpenOffice.org still borders on the unusable.

Some examples from my own usage:

• Impress, the PowerPoint-wannabe (while here, who actually knew what "Impress" is before I compared it to PowerPoint?) is a) horribly bug ridden and b) is practically impossible to use to create presentations that are as nice looking as those that users of PowerPoint 2007 receive as generic templates. In Impress, it's still a lottery if you have a fairly complex presentation, that it will look the same when saved and loaded! It saves in a lossy format (not funny)! My presentations crested in OOo 3 are almost unusable in OOo2 despite using the same nominal file format (i.e. it doesn't complain, it just interprets the formatting differently)! Setting background fills is particularly clunky and uncertain, but there are bugs in line styles, arrows and animations. The 3.0 release fixed none of the bugs I encountered and introduced at least one more: pasting slides is impossible in the middle of the slide sequence. The vector clipart, the color palette and the bitmap tools are all unusable, mostly because they offer functionality from 1995 (remember MS Office 95?) or such and haven't been upgraded. One annoying item that's lacking is making the bitmaps transparent in a color-key fashion - in MS Office, you can select a bitmap and with a click of the mouse make one of its colours transparent - so, for example you don't have rectangular edges in the graphics of a round marble you pasted (it's pretty nice, I think it also does an anti-alias around the masked region). Still, in 2009, OOo can't do this.
• OpenOffice Base was never finished. There's really nothing more to say here. It doesn't have features Access 97 had, and here I mostly mean programming and reporting features that have made Access great for small scale office accounting applications. Its extremely dumb choice of database format prohibits it *by design* from being used by multiple users at the same time, like Access could (yes, early Access had locking problems, but nothing that couldn't be solved by server reboots and a BAT file removing the .lck files).
• Office .DOC format compatibility isn't perfect - I had a document yesterday that started significantly diverging in formatting when viewed in OOo and MS Office about in the middle of it. It was nothing fancy, a common two-column scientific paper. Of course, this kind of compatibility may never be perfect but it also means that using both Offices in the same organization isn't possible if the organization produces non-trivial documents.

Stagnating? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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.

Open Office is a great shot against MS.

[MongooseCN]

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.

Re:Open Office is a great shot against MS.

[couchslug]

"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.

As a replacement for MS Office, it's OK

[Omnifarious]

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.

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.

Barriers to Entry

[Jekler]

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.

Re:Barriers to Entry

[slashbart]

Exactly!

I've tried to build OOo, and after hours of installing all kinds of dependencies and compiling it turned out that the thing would not compile a working binary. There was some sort of circular dependency in it, with a compile bug in one, and when I removed that supposedly optional configure item, something else would fail.

I'm far from inexperienced, but the OOo build setup is too complicated! I had this idea to make a sort of stripped version of OOo, to fill the niche that Framemaker used to have, but I gave up on it due to the non-functional build process.

If the OOo team would like to have an open-source community around it, it would have to put major emphasis on fixing and documenting the build process.

Bart

Re:It's 2009

[Registered Coward v2]

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

"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)

Re:"Finished" software

[markdavis]

OO is far from "finished". It is a great suite, but there are *hundreds* of things that need to be added and *thousands* of things that need to be fixed. I have reported a dozen requests for useful features over the years that I and my users really need. Only one or so has ever made it to light.

Want an example? In Writer, you can convert all text to uppercase or lowercase. But there is no function for "Initial Caps". WordPerfect and MS-Word both have that feature, and have for many, many years. Then add some salt to the wound: Calc doesn't have the ability to convert cases AT ALL. When I reported this oversight, there were many supporters, and many duplicate reports. SEVEN YEARS PASSED and it is still not implemented!

That feature is hardly "bloat". I use it all the time when converting data from one type of use or system to another. There are hundreds of similar types of improvements that need to be made.

"Finished"?? Absolutely not.

Re:"Finished" software

[Al Al Cool J]

While I agree with the problem of Initial Caps in writer, I don't understand your critism of calc. You change case with =UPPER(), =LOWER(), and =PROPER(). Using functions to perform operations seems perfectly reasonable to me for spreadsheet software.

Re:"Finished" software

[markdavis]

I couldn't have worded that better myself.

Certainly there has to be SOME control over what features are added, since one person's feature is another's bloat. But who is to decide which is which? qa.openoffice.org is the only real way that users can provide feedback on bugs, issues, problems, and feature requests. If numerous users make a valid case for why something should be included and it gets lots of votes, but is shot down for no apparent reason, it tends to sour the whole process.

Another example- I requested that the spell checker detect double words: "I would like like to go to the store". Many others requested it also. The OO spell checker ALREADY checks punctuation and initial caps, so this is not a stretch; besides, it is even easy to implement. WordPerfect has had double word detection for eons. Yet, the OO team decided to close the issue and say that double word detection should be in some theoretical language checker add-on rather than in OO!

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.

Re:Novell "profoundly sick"

[jbolden]

What is so wrong with allowing your employees to express their honest opinions on issues not terribly closely related to the company? Especially when they do so in their own name.

IMHO Novell should be applauded for allowing free speech not condemned.

Re:Novell "profoundly sick"

[shutdown -p now]

Novells private fork (which has problems so big that the official OOo inconveniences are just laughable)

Can you give some specific examples? I'm not trolling, I just want to know because I've been using the Novell fork for a while now, and recommending it to different people over the stock OO.org implementation, mostly because of slightly better MSOffice compatibility... is there something I'm missing? In terms of features and bugs and other technical problems, anyway, not some "embrace & extend" FUD.

Re:Novell "profoundly sick"

[Anonymous Coward]

Novells private fork (which has problems so big that the official OOo inconveniences are just laughable)

Can you give some specific examples?

To be honest: No, because I wouldnt be anonymous anymore ;-).
Sun provides the QA and RelEng for the OOo releases. QA is quite picky, which can be frustrating for devs. However, they keep the worst out of office. 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
• 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)

And yes, there are subtile and interesting bugs in the Novellbuilds that arent there in the official build. Yes, they where communicated to the Novell guys. I cant go into specifics, because I wouldnt be anon in the OOo microcosmos anymore.

Re:It's 2009

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

Do users really need an open source desktop suite when they can meet their needs using a server based suite? Broadband is cheap.

Yes.

• Availability

• Mobility

• Privacy

• Reliability

Re:It's 2009

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Very bad

[Psychotria]

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.

Re:Very bad

[dubl-u]

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 came here to say that

[pecosdave]

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.

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:Too complex

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:It's 2009

[GreatBunzinni]

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.

Maybe office tools are just boring to develop ?

[Viol8]

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.

Re:It's 2009

[ta bu shi da yu]

Easy. All they have to do is refuse to take contributions from the rest of the community. Kohei's solver module is a case in point. He had a fully functional solver, and what did Sun do? They wrote their own.

Re:It's 2009

[tepples]

How can Sun control an open source project?

Name recognition, and the time investment in becoming the maintainer of a codebase of this size.

OpenOffice.org is LGPL

[tepples]

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.

Re:OpenOffice.org is LGPL

[TheRaven64]

It is worth noting that the LGPLv3 is incompatible with GPLv2 (or, more accurately, GPLv2 is incompatible with LGPLv3), so it can not be combined with open source projects that choose this license and don't have the 'or later versions' clause.

Re:OpenOffice.org is LGPL

[squiggleslash]

So we're not going to be able to integrate OpenOffice.org into the Linux kernel? Damn it! That'd have been awesome!

Re:OOo versus MS Office?

[arotenbe]

Could someone please give me a quick comparison between OOo and MS Office?

Here you go: OpenOffice.org has every feature that any practical user would ever want or need. Microsoft Office has these, too, but it also has the ability to generate charts in seventeen dimensions, which for some reason is the one feature absolutely essential to whoever you happen to be trading documents with.

Re:It's 2009

[Daengbo]

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.

Re:The same thing but free is not enough

[Computershack]

I am not a programmer, but I would probably go for something that's entirely web based, but that can also be used offline.

Like you can in MSO2007 with the "Office Live!" add ins?

International support

[charlener]

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.

Re:Yeah, and...

[cperciva]

Firstly is a real word; and according to the Oxford English Dictionary, has been in use ever since 1532. Quotations include "Walke thou fyrstly, walke thou lastly; Walke in the walke that standeth fastly" (1562), "A most delightful [ballad]... which has been laid firstly to Pope and secondly to me" (1723), and "These objects are twofold: firstly, to promote [etc.]" (1857).

Of course, in 1847 the word 'firstly' was accused of being a "ridiculous and most pedantic neologism" (falsely -- being over 300 years old, it was hardly a neologism), and I'll freely admit that it isn't a very *nice* word; but it's a word whether we like it or not.

Re:I wouldn't develop for it, and heres why...

[Mad Merlin]

You know that OOo is primarily written in C++, right? Base (the database thingie that appeared in 2.0) and the help system use Java, but that's pretty much it. You don't even need Java installed to run OOo, try it, you probably won't notice the difference.

Re:Yeah, and...

[MrMr]

Very true, in fact, there are no real words in English that start with an 'f'.

Because it is related problem

[hotfireball]

I might be wrong, but that's my opinion:

• If you have a possibility and have to make a decision what to work with: MS Office or OpenOffice, the choice is very obvious to the first one. Second is always optional and in most cases not used.
• Those, who can get Windows can get MS Office.
• Those, who can get Mac, can get MS Office too. And iWork (I use it, BTW).
• Those, who can not afford things above, they use Linux on desktop. And Linux on desktop has miserable market share percentage. That means that company are not going to invest into these things just because it is free stuff.

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.

Re:It's 2009

[je ne sais quoi]

I don't know what their deal is, but the grand-parent's comment about Sun not playing nice with volunteer developers is not a new one. The guys over at NeoOffice also started by trying to contribute to a Mac port of OO.o, except Sun rebuffed them much preferring to write their own which is OO.o native mac port. Here's a quote from one of the two developers for neooffice in response to some comments by a Sun employee:

While it is wonderful that Sun has put so much work into the Windows, Linux, and Solaris ports over the years (and I have no criticism with that), their behavior in the Mac area has been quite aggressive towards us over that last few years. We've taken Sun's open source license, implemented a huge hole in their code, and made no attempt to proprietarize the code. What did we get in return, lots of very negative pressure from the OOo managers and volunteers. So you are surprised when we view their grand magical Mac port as competition?

For a long time now, Sun has been pulling a bit of a bait and switch. They claim that they are open source friendly, etc. etc., but then they do everything they can to prevent any outside interference. That's they whole reason why NeoOffice exists, the guys who made it got tired of Sun giving them the run-around.

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

[z_gringo]

Sun requires commits be dual-licensed so that Sun can use the code in the commercial version, Star Office. That's how they control


Digium does the same thing with Asterisk, and that project seems to be advancing nicely.

Re:It's 2009

[nurb432]

Haven't you heard? Broadband is capped for many of us. Do you want to have to pay extra to check on that spreadsheet some weekend? I don't.

Besides, broadband isn't the answer for everyone. Availability, security, offline areas, are all concerns for many of us.

Might be YOUR solution, but its not everyones.

Re:It's 2009

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Where I live is surrounded by farms and I'd have to travel 90 minutes either east or west (Albany or Springfield) to get 3G. Rural areas are more likely to be serviced by cable or DSL than have access to 3G, unless they're right next to a large city.

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

Re:It's 2009

[Nazlfrag]

There are literally thousands of problems with your scenario, and zero with ASCII. Try again.

It depends

[Lonewolf666]

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.

Re:It depends

[jbolden]

If you look back there where serious players in XFree who were talking about breaking off into a fork which induced them to kick some people off commit. Those people represented Suse and RedHat. That caused public outrage and a the fork to actually form. XFree86 then changed the license so their code couldn't get pulled into the fork and it was after that that distributions like debian sided with the Suse / Redhat guys.

So the story is a bit more complicated.

Re:It's 2009

[jbolden]

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.

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.

Re:It's 2009

[Stile 65]

a document format that I'll be able to use for 10 years, or 20.

ASCII

EBCDIC

Re:It's 2009

[FishWithAHammer]

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.

Re:It's 2009

[Rysc]

TeX would be an excellent format for a WYSIWYG editor to save in to. It would not be possible with the WYSIWYG to do all of the nice things you can do with TeX, but as long as it saves down to this common, malleable format a broad amount of compatibility is achieved for free. Let the users who want to learn nothing use a simple GUI tool which produces code which can be tweaked by hand, or by other existing tools, when needed.

Why not?

Re:It's 2009

[Enderandrew]

As far as I understand it, it isn't just agreeing to a dual-license, but handing over the copyright to Sun. Sun could decide as the copyright owner to ONLY include it in Sun Office, and not include it in the open source versions of OpenOffice.

That being said, there already is a nice fork that Meeks presides over at go-oo.org and several distros use it in place of Sun's OOo right now, and most people don't even seem to realize it.

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.

Re:Why I didn't contribute to OOo

[peraspera]

I had a similar experience. I wanted to fix the scanner dialog in swriter. I couldn't set the dpi value for my scanner. I fixed it and set an email to the most appropriate core developers listed on the OO developers site. I received an answer a month later or so, asking me to sign an agreement with SUN. At the same time I received an email from a developer who encouraged me to continue. I sent by fax the agreement and fixed several other things. The guy contacted me several times asking if I had received a response from SUN. I think I received it three months later. Meanwhile I had tried to scan directly from the dialog (which can only configure the scanner, scanning is started from another entry in the Insert image menu). The dialog doesn't return a value. How can I change it? It is impossible, the function prototypes are kept in a jar file. How long does it take to raise the interest of a core developer on this issue I don't know, but I think 6 months at least. Then OO 3.0 was out and I had to start it all over. But the code is really a mess: there are sections with comments in German tagged with: **********Better left alone******** and the like.

Re:It's 2009

[Antique Geekmeister]

The tool you're looking for is called 'LyX'. I've used it for years to edit various people's LaTeX documents, especially those from college professors who learned their craft in the early 1980's and aren't interested in updating their documents.

Re:It's 2009

[Chris_Jefferson]

Kohei wouldn't sign the copyright over to them. Try writing an addition to emacs or gcc and submit it to the FSF without a copyright assignment and you'll get exactly the same response.

Re:OOo versus MS Office?

[westlake]

OpenOffice.org has every feature that any practical user would ever want or need. Microsoft Office has these, too, but it also has the ability to generate charts in seventeen dimensions, which for some reason is the one feature absolutely essential to whoever you happen to be trading documents with.

This gets modded up as "funny," but cuts close to the truth.

It doesn't matter if you have a clerical staff of five, fifty, or five thousand. The work has to get out the door before the close of business.

You find a desk and chair for the temp and expect her to be productive.

If the "obscure" functionality she needs is integrated into MS Office - and it almost certainly will be - you are halfway home.

The geek is fundamentally a loner.

He'll consider an app "bloated" if it includes anything he doesn't need. That makes it very hard for him to conceptualize anything as amorphous as an office suite.

He can also be afflicted with a kind of tunnel vision.

He'll see Word or Excel but only rarely the MS Office environment - the MS Office system - as a whole.

Resources, third-party apps and so on.

While SharePoint - strictly speaking - wasn't an "Office" app it very quietly generated a billion dollars in sales for Microsoft - and helped strengthen its position.

Re:It's 2009

[Dogtanian]

I've read both those main links through- first time I've heard about that incident. Here are my thoughts:-

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.

Re:It's 2009

[westlake]

How can Sun control an open source project?

Sun is Big Daddy Warbucks, your prime source for funding.

Full-time management. Full-time development.

The geek - the volunteer developer - sees everything as code.

If the problem is not in the code he is fucked.

Microsoft can afford to employ experts in office management, workflow and training, psychologists, physicians...

Experts in layout and design.

Typography.

If his GUI is - to the uninitiated - as unintelligible and crippled as The GIMP is alleged to be, the problem can't be fixed.

Re:It's 2009

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they are competing against Microsoft Office. You have to understand your competition.

Re:It's 2009

[bugi]

Back when ebcdic was relevant, the basic encoding of characters wasn't a mature technology. Now it is. ASCII will be in use as the lowest common denominator for a long time, if only as a subset of utf.

Go ahead and rely on ascii for your word processing needs. Vim is heavy-weight enough as it is -- no sense weighing down your whole machine with something gargantuan like ooo or emacs.

Re:It's 2009

[Prof.Phreak]

EBCDIC is still alive! Probably will still be alive in 10-20 years.

Re:It's 2009

[jbolden]

Open office exports to TeX

Re:It's 2009

[Al Dimond]

It's not evil that matters. It's indifference. They're ad brokers. That means you're the product, not the customer. That means they're not accountantable to you. It doesn't matter if they satisfy you as long as they satisfy enough people in their target markets. Don't trust Google for anything that matters.

Documentation seems deliberately obtuse

[zooblethorpe]

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,

Re:Documentation seems deliberately obtuse

[Abcd1234]

Please, read the TextCursor API page linked above, and then see if you can quickly understand what properties and methods a TextCursor object has.

Okay, I've never once looked at the OO.o API document, but I can tell you right now that, as a developer, those docs are completely understandable. The TextCursor object implements a whole series of interfaces. If you want to know what those specific interfaces do, then hit the links for them. For example, here's the doc for the XTextCursor interface:

http://api.openoffice.org/docs/common/ref/com/sun/star/text/XTextCursor.html

As you can see, it has a bunch of methods for moving the cursor around. The other interfaces do essentially the same thing, but at the sentence and paragraph level. Meanwhile, the XPropertySet interface, described here:

http://api.openoffice.org/docs/common/ref/com/sun/star/beans/XPropertySet.html

Gives access to the TextCursor state. This is the one problem I see with the documentation. Because the XPropertySet interface exports a generic property provider interface, there isn't actually any doc to describe the properties that are applicable to a TextCursor instance. 'course, the easiest answer is to hack up some test code to emit all the properties and see what's there, but that's certainly not ideal.

So... what was it you were complaining about, again?

My; insecure much?

[RustinHWright]

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.

Link tree vs. single page

[zooblethorpe]

So... what was it you were complaining about, again?

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:

...there isn't actually any doc to describe the properties that are applicable to a TextCursor instance. 'course, the easiest answer is to hack up some test code to emit all the properties and see what's there, but that's certainly not ideal.

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,

Re:Link tree vs. single page

[Abcd1234]

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.

So? That's why the the great Noodly one invented the Back button. :) Your question was "see if you can quickly understand what properties and methods a TextCursor object has.". The answer is, yes, I can, trivially. It requires a bit of a clicking around, but so what?

'course, I might contend that the software itself seems overly complex (are all those Cursor interfaces really reused anywhere, or are they just over-engineering for the sake of it?). But the API docs seem sane enough.

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.

So, ultimately, your complaint is you have to click around.

Might I suggest you're just a little lazy and nitpicky? ;)

Truthfully, I do see your point. But I really don't think the OO.o docs are nearly as bad as you make them out to be (trust me, I've seen *far* worse). And the OO.o docs do have one advantage: the methods and properties end up clustered based on the nature of their function. I almost prefer that to the neverending list of methods and properties present on that (and every other) MSDN page you cited.

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.

While I agree that's true in general, one should be fair and point out that many FOSS projects do have excellent documentation. Perl and Python, along with their attendant swarms of modules, are generally very well documented. And let's not forget the venerable Unix manpage system, which is awash with useful information (though in an admittedly primitive form, only somewhat obviated by the GNU info system).

But I'll agree that many projects could do *far* better.

Re:Link tree vs. single page

[zooblethorpe]

Fair enough. I suppose I'm showing some bias -- I'm one of those folks who get lost in dictionaries and encyclopedias, where cross-referencing leads me down a rabbit hole and fifteen minutes later I realize I've forgotten what I went to look up in the first place. :) Hence my preference for one-page object explanations -- I find everything I need in one place, and can read up and get back to whatever I was doing without wandering through a link tree and possibly getting sidetracked.

And you're right about Perl and Python and the man pages. Meanwhile, on the flip side, we've got OOo, Compiere / Adempiere, Plone (at least, last time I looked at it)... where the docs are sparse, hard to read through (for me anyway), or just plain missing in places.

Interesting, that -- languages and shells seem to have the best documentation, while platforms and big applications seem to have the worst. Do you see this trend too, or is it just my own limited experience?

Cheers,

Re:Link tree vs. single page

[Abcd1234]

Interesting, that -- languages and shells seem to have the best documentation, while platforms and big applications seem to have the worst. Do you see this trend too, or is it just my own limited experience?

That does seem to be a common phenomenon. 'course, it may simply be a function of project maturity. Python, Perl, and the Unix manpage system have been around for ages compared to OO or <insert latest web framework>. It's also the case that, generally speaking, large applications have less of a need for proper doc... ie, in the case of Python and Perl, the entire purpose is to provide a programmable API, and such an API *requires* good documentation in order for it to be used. The same isn't true of OO.o.

Of course, that should argue that a project like Plone would have decent doc. Some of those problems may be related to culture (in contrast, in the Perl community, writing POD is strongly encouraged), or the way the project is managed (rapidly evolving projects mean developers are focused on solving nifty problems, instead of documenting their solutions). 'course, my own biases make me wonder if it's just that many of these projects start out as flash-in-the-pan, trendy, buzzword-compliant solutions, which, in the end, have no real long-term project vision, and the result is a mess of code and documentation... but that's probably unfair of me. :)