The Uncertain Future of OpenOffice.org

eldavojohn writes "What's the biggest threat to the success of OpenOffice.org? Is it Microsoft Office? Is it the simple fact that Dell doesn't offer it with computers? Not according to some participants in the 'open' source project itself, they say the biggest problem with OO.o is the fact that Sun codes, owns & makes all key decisions for the project when it should be more community oriented. A professor who participates in the project itself said 'enough developers are frustrated by both the technical and the organizational infrastructure at OpenOffice.org' and cites this as 'a real problem that is weighing on the project.' Other members of the community agree like Michael Meeks who asked 'At what fraction of the community will Sun reconsider its demand for ownership of the entirety of OpenOffice.org?' Hopefully with IBM's entrance into OO.o participation we will see the product become more community controlled & accessible. Has anyone else experienced this when developing for OO.o or another 'open' source project? Is it a good idea to criticize a company when they've put so much effort into a project that is technically open source and completely free? Is Sun trying to control OO.o like Java? Do they have good reasons or evil underlying intentions?"

In order...

Not continually improving both feature- and UI-wise, yes, no, around 3/5, yes, yes, probably, and both.

Now that we've cleared that up, anything else I can help with?

Re:In order...

I think that wraps this thread up... direct and to the point... well done.

Re:In order...

Is it a good idea to criticize a company when they've put so much effort into a project that is technically open source and completely free?

If they are doing a bad job of managing it, then yes. Releasing it under an open source license is good, and they should be recognized for that. However, doing so doesn't automatically excuse other problems they may have.

Re:In order...

This sounds like more Sun bashing rather than any real issues. Consider Linux. Only a few people have commit privs. Any forked version is pretty much guaranteed to die by the wayside due to the momentum of the parent. And if you have good ideas there's a reasonable chance that they may be copied by a more established kernel dev and checked in under their name. Look at Firefox, only a few people can participate. Both are arguably less open than OOo and yet we don't see anybody pissing on them.

Re:In order...

Exactly, except the fraction. Either the community owns it, or it doesn't... There's no 'partially community owned'. It doesn't REALLY matter, though, since the project is open source. If Sun gets stupid, fork time - 'Completely Amazing Office' has a nice ring to it. The fact that the initials CAO is pronounced 'cow' should not be taken into consideration. ;)

Re:In order...

"It sucked, swallowed and asked for seconds."

That sounds like a commendation and not a criticism to me. . . .

Dont think so.

Not necessarily. The beauty of the license allows for forking. Just like you have the OS X variation. So OO will probably never die, but it might be forked and morphed under a different name eventually.

Re:Dont think so.

or OfficeWeasel?

Kind of has a ring to it ... sort of like calling Major Frank Burns (M*A*S*H) ferret-face.

Re:Dont think so.

Nononono - if we're gonna fork the thing, let's give it a good and proper name:

OfficeSpace

I mean, lookit: the clueless would look and go "oooh, cool name - space to do my docs n' stuff!"

The rest of us will simply giggle when we get asked why the app suite insists on showing a red stapler on the splash screen.

/P

Re:Dont think so.

Go on then. Do it. What are you waiting for?

At the moment, Sun pays for 80% of the development work on OO.o, Novell for about 15%, and a few other contributors do the rest. If you fork it, you will immediately lose 80% of the developers, and may lose a lot from the remaining 20%, so I hope you're up for a lot of work.

Or do you mean you want the 'community' to control it, but not actually have to write any of the code?

Hopefully...

Hopefully having 35 full time developers at IBM contributing code back to the project will really help this situation. OO.o is great software and I'm quite happy with it

naw

Sun will contribute 35 managers...

Why not?

"Is it a good idea to criticize a company when.."

Is it a good idea to lie to a company or not provide any (constructive) feedback on negative issues just because they're being nice? If nobody is honest with them then their product may start off well and then head south quickly due to the pandering masses.

Re:Why not?

Speaking as a Sun employee, and on behalf of many of my fellow employees: hear, hear! Sun has always had control issues. It's part of the corporate culture. People here criticize this every day, both constructively and otherwise. Why should the larger community be any different?

One suggestion: don't complain to other Slashdotters: not a lot they can do. And don't complain to me: I'm just a hardware tech writer. Take your complaints to the top [sun.com].

Damned if you do...

Sun gets bad press for not developing free software...

Sun gets bad press for developing free software...

Tough crowd.

You must be new here (only Apple,Google=good)

You must be new here. On Slashdot, only Google's "black box" search engine (and related products) and Apple's proprietary OS and hardware are considered "good". All other products and companies (with some rare open source project exceptions) are considered bad and/or evil.

Re:Damned if you do...

The open source "community" doesn't exactly have the best track record developing complex GUI intensive applications. There is Gimp which is OK but not great. Firefox isn't exactly doing much as far as UI goes. KDE and Gnome both have ... issues ... in particular the fact that there are two desktops in the first place fragmenting application development and massively duplicating effort.

There are times when its not exactly bad to have one entity, whether it be a company or an individual, who puts an end to the bickering, makes a decision, sets the direction, imperfect though it may be, and makes everyone pull in the same direction. Linus serves that role for the kernel, SUN does it for Open Office.

Debate is good, expressing different views is good, one entity with poor vision dictating direction is bad. But, a project with a hundred chiefs and no Indians, and design by committee is not a always a prescription for success.

Re:Damned if you do...

The open source "community" doesn't exactly have the best track record developing complex GUI intensive applications.

And the "greatest understatement of the year" award goes to.... *drum rolls*

Re:Damned if you do...

Firefox isn't exactly doing much as far as UI goes.

Some could successfully argue that Firefox contains a HUGE amount of UI work. The entire app is one large UI system.

Re:Damned if you do...

Funny you should say this, because to date, the only radial menu system I have ever encountered was an open source window manager. I would say that counts a massive step forward in UI design (I live for the day when radial menus are the norm, but like Dvorak keyboards, it probably won't happen).

Crying wolf..

This is a panic piece, trying to rile upfeelings, almost trolling. Relax guys, Sun hasnt shown the steps that is being worried about here. When it does, then let us begin discussing. Till then, it is useless speculation and little better than FUD.

Biggest threat?

What's the biggest threat to the success of OpenOffice.org?

That's easy; Microsoft suing Sun for violating patents for MS Office 'inventions'. You know it's coming.

As far as Sun's dominant position over OOo goes; as long as they keep performing I don't see the problem. New 2.x releases have been appearing every few months and each is a notable improvement. They're doing a good job and while they keep doing it they'll remain in control. Their latest release provides a platform for extensions; go develop your miracle feature and let Sun keep cranking on the core platform, as they have been.

Re:Biggest threat?

That's easy; Microsoft suing Sun for violating patents for MS Office 'inventions'. You know it's coming.

When they do that, it'll just mean that OpenOffice.org is ready for primetime.

Re:Biggest threat?

For real.

You're not happy with the direction of the project?

Fork it. It's LGPL'd. Take the code, release it under your new project, and make improvements that "the community", whatever the heck that means to you, will approve of.

Sheesh, as a previous poster said, tough crowd. Sun can't do anything right in the eyes of slashdot smitties.

~X

Ergocracy

For most free software, it is the case that those who contribute most work to the project, also influence its direction the most.

Diffuse or Focused?

The question becomes does the community want another diffuse, nobody really in charge project, or do you want a benevolent dictator ensuring focus and quality control? Sun should be commended for sticking with OO for so long, when they could have just dumped all responsibility and let it drift aimlessly. They obviously have an interest, because with a few other tweaks they sell (or give it away to proper channels) as StarOffice, so it's doubtful they'll want to let go too much. Unless the Linus of OfficeSuites steps forward, then I'd rather see Sun or IBM maintain final say, to keep it on track.

From reading the comments here for years, the biggest issue with contributing seems to be that the code is a behemoth, and takes time and skill to understand. This hasn't stopped the NeoOffice folks from getting it running on Macs, and Sun's continuing final say shouldn't stop anyone from adding some missing features (such as a decent reference manager, or spell and grammar checker).

Perhaps this explains a few things...

perhaps this inner turmoil and frustration is the blinking indicator light of why things don't get done. I've wanted good envelope and label support for quite some time, and with recent releases it has gotten better - but not really. It is sort of like a stub article in a technical wiki...we intend to put something more substantial here notice.
Management is getting in the way of simple upgrades and additions?
Never worked for a company like that before.

cough cough

Sun Bashing

Why all the Sun bashing? Opensolaris is open source. Java is almost fully open sourced now. OpenOffice is open source. What the hell is wrong with Sun wanting to maintain some influence over the projects they started?

Re:Sun Bashing

You're damn right. Anyone who doesn't like it can go fork it themselves.

If you don't like the community around OO.o, fork it and make your own community. If you think the codebase is too unwieldy to fork, there are plenty of other open source office suites you can contribute to.

Re:Sun Bashing

You raise a rather valid point. Linus himself will tell you his position in the kernel development is basically, will this patch go in, won't it. From my understanding of the whole situation, Sun's position is more involved than Linus even. They actually write a whole bunch of stuff themselves and decide to put it in, along with other stuff that other people write out. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems to me that Sun is doing more to further OS development than Linus.

That being said, watch as I get modded down massively.

Can anyone...

...more proficient in programming than me explain why OOo uses its own inbuilt font rendering and toolkit? Aren't these things already provided by all modern guest OS's?

IANAPBPKEAITBD [I Am Not A Programmer But Probably Know Enough About It To Be Dangerous] but if cross-platform-ness is a big thing, would it not be easier to have a series of OS-independent libs in the background with native frontends in win32, GTK, Qt, etc? This would also make it easier to make the user interface more "friendly" by way of familiarity and not sticking out like a sore thumb? To my mind the problems users see with OOo, aside from some user unfriendliness in some sections such as mail merge, are that it's slow as hell to start up, even from warm, the GUI is sometimes unresponsive/laggy and it looks (superfically) different from most apps they're used to (apparently this is "allowed" for stupid flashy apps, but a big no-no for "serious" apps).

Chances are I'm barking up the wrong tree and my knowledge of OOo is hopelessly wrong, but for non-developers these things can be tricky to understand.

Re:Can anyone...

As near as I can tell, OOO has two major problems. Once upon a time, StarOffice actually had it's own mini-desktop from which the major pieces of the app like Writer and documents could be started from. This desktop even had its own widget set called VCL. Sun wisely did away with the goofy Desktop UI but OOO's UI is still implemented in this widget set. Whenever OOO is ported to a new environment, the major sticking point is that a binding layer has to be created from VCL to a widget set in the environment. Being a C++ widget set with more or less conventional semantics, VCL mapped well to GTK2 and Windows so Linux and Windows are easy ports in that regard. It is a very poor impedance match to Cocoa on Objective C and still appears to be hosing a truly native Mac port to this day. The NeoOffice guys use Cocoa through Java which makes a thin shim programming wise but a pig memory and resource wise as they have to have Java active and resident in memory for their VCL -> Cocoa mapper.

The other problem is that OOO isn't well divided up internally. It was designed to load as a huge glop o' code back in the StarOffice days and still does. I once argued about this until I was blue in the face with a OOO developer on NewsForge. I could not get it through his head that I wasn't talking about splitting off Writer, Calc and so-forth into separate apps. I understood that OOO's "apps" are developed from an internal common set of objects (which also means an equivalent to MS' COM system is also loaded with the main app). I was talking about being smarter about which objects to load initially and then loading others on demand. This would get the startup time and usual memory usage down. It would also make it easier to use OOO as an API the way Office is used as an API.

Every big project needs a dictator...

they say the biggest problem with OO.o is the fact that Sun codes, owns & makes all key decisions for the project when it should be more community oriented.

So SUN drops certain ideas and keeps others--so does Linus! If you want to develop your own openoffice make a fork. You need someone to point a project in direction or it will go nowhere fast. The last thing this office suite needs is a big committee slowing development, it's just started getting good!

Just closed source shills complaining

Most of the complainer are just closed source shills who wants to use the normal divide and conquer method to try and alienate different open source grounps against each other.

IBM just added 30+ developers to Open Office.org and OopenOffice.Org just released 2,3 of course closed source shills are out to spread damaging rumors about one of the most successful open source project in existance.

Is is just me or have we not seen a large increase in astroturf shilling recently ?

Fork to Opener Office

Time to fork open office? I think so. This time without java please.

Then fork

If you can do a better job coding, owning, and making key decisions, then fork the project and demonstrate.

If you can't fork because you need Sun's expertise, then maybe you should admit that Sun deserves to participate on their own terms, just as you participate on yours.

For years I've been amazed at how people will whine and whine about the direction an Open Source project is taking, rather than just demonstrating that another direction is better. The people doing the work are exercising their freedom to do whatever they want however they want it done. If you don't like it, not only is nobody making you participate, but lots of people have invested lots of work in giving you the freedom to do it the way you want to, instead.

It worked for EGCS and X.org. But 99% of the time, it's just whiners whining that they don't have control. Power and control don't matter in Open Source; we all have equal power. You have the power to control your own version, and if that's truly holding the project that you're whining about back, then obviously once you unleash your new vision of project management yours will blow away the one you're whining about.

Re:Then fork

"If you can't fork because you need Sun's expertise, then maybe you should admit that Sun deserves to participate on their own terms, just as you participate on yours."

It is a logical fallacy to say that someone only has a valid complaint against someone if they can do it better.

"we all have equal power"
No, we don't. It is perfectly valid for someone who can't code to complaing about a bug or the lack of a feature, or the fact that it is slow. Just like a automobile owner can complain if their breaks don't work. No one is going to say to them to shut up unless they are willing to build there own car.

Re:Then fork

Complaints can be valid all day long, but that doesn't necessarily make them helpful.

When you're managing a project, usually you have to make decisions that are going to piss some people off. Those people can whine about it forever or simply realize that the decision had to be made and shut up about it. If they feel a bad decision is THAT big a deal, then it's time to put up or shut up, and show everyone else how wrong they are. That's productive and helpful, complaining isn't.

I find OpenOffice to be really good software, and it's improving rapidly. I don't see the problem in the grand scheme of things.

Proof is in the pudding...and it's ready to eat

Disclaimer: I am one of the founders of NeoOffice [neooffice.org].

I think there's already interesting proof that forks can provide a very viable alternative to the overhead of the OOo project. Although the reasons are many, one of the big problems I historically had as a Mac OOo engineer was trying to get patches approved by Sun engineering. It has proven to be more efficient to have engineering freedom, allowing us to implement things that might never be approved by Hamburg. Being independent also has allowed us to implement a binary patching system so our bug fixes can be delivered quickly and independently if any marketing driven release schedules. Being outside the politics has also allowed us to integrate other open source technologies into the application that are important to Mac users, such as VBA support as well as OpenXML import and export. Yes, OpenXML import and export could be integrated into OOo today but engineering politics and Sun's manipulation of the project to foment a document format war have kept this functionality out of OOo, doing nothing except harm users that need to seamlessly integrate with MS Office environments.

NeoOffice has been shipping a solid, native, GPL licensed Mac product for over 2 whole years. We have shown forking is successful. Dropping the politics of the OOo organization has made us more efficient and resulted in a better product that users appreciate. We have had a free software solution for Mac for years, and all OOo has done is exorcise all reference to us from their website. Perhaps it is just banishment for daring to do things differently and not helping to propogate the name of OOo (which Jonathan Schwartz has publicly said is Sun's second most valuable brand after Java). Seems a bit like Sun wants control to me. It will be interesting to see if Sun has the stones to snub IBM for its Lotus Symphony brand in the same fashion.

ed

Tell me about open source...

Open Office is that, right?

I just think OO.o lacks a focus. As other Slashdot members had said earlier, it seems to be over engineered and not thought out enough in a 'direction.' An engineer says "Java is a good idea to have" so they add Java... and bring other woes.

While I know some people may dislike the new Office 2007, after using it for a while now, I can say honestly that it's the best version yet. The usability and UI are greatly improved (once you get used to them). Open Office lacks the 'polish' that a Microsoft Office delivers. This isn't about document format wars folks -- it's about the sheer usability of one platform over another. You cannot invent a similar animal as a MS Office, and then go your own direction even if it's smarter. You have to adopt the platform, and make it your own. That's how Firefox has taken off so well. They came in as a web browser, same functions, and built upon it.

Open Office (and I haven't checked out the latest version) comes in and says that it's a replacement for MS Office... but it does things its own way. Some shortcut keys are similar, but a lot of stuff is different. It's usable for sure, especially for /. users, but for the average Joe who has used Office everywhere else, OO.o is a different animal. And it's uglier and slower.

Make it pretty, make it similar... then build upon it. Not before. Just my thought anyway... maybe Sun will take it to heart. I don't see any benefit or disadvantage to having more control in the community hands, because like they say.. too many cooks spoil the broth. And we will have a LOT of cooks all trying to make feature decisions, instead of a focused core of people that guide the direction of a project.

Since when does Open Source mean...

that anyone who wants to contribute code is guaranteed that their contributed code wil be used?

"OpenOffice.org has a very central business process of controlling what comes into the source base and by that very system misses the point of Open Source development," said Ken Foskey, an Australian open-source developer who volunteered for OpenOffice.org for three years. He left in 2005 after becoming "increasingly frustrated" with the organization's bureaucracy.

Once a project reaches a certain size and a certain number of users who expect the program(s) to remain usable then some sort of quality control has to come into play. This means that some code contributions will be rejected for various reasons.

Contributors whose code is rejected in such a manner don't need to fly into a snit and have a hissy fit about the project rejecting them. They're entirely free to incorporate their code into their local sources and compile and use the program(s) as they see fit. They can even distribute the modified sources and executables to anyone who wants to use them as well.

That's supposed to be the point of Open Source is it not? The freedom to have the code and modify the code and compile the code and run the programs.

Not the freedom to insist that your code be accepted and incorporated into the main source tree. (Well actually you're free to insist on this but the maintainers of the main source tree are equally free to ignore you.)

The beauty of free software..

Clearly, OO has a large enough user base and developer base. Suppose the Sun is infact trying to control OO and that this becomes evident in future, then we will see a fork. If not, and Sun is actually fair and just, then there is no problem at all. Once a free software project has a large enough user base and developer base nothing can get in the way.

LOTUS SMARTSUITE?

This is why IBM should find a way to resurrect and rejuvenate Lotus SmartSuite, particularly Lotus WordPro, Lotus Approach, and Lotus 1-2-3.

Perhaps if ...

Sun weren't trying to act all warm and fuzzy about open source one second and then siding with SCO the next and then shutting their mouths when it looks like SCO is going to get a smackdown and acting all warm and fuzzy about open source again, people wouldn't be all suspicious about their intentions.

Something is wrong - bugs not fixed

While I greatly appreciate the work that is done on OOo, there does seem to be something wrong when it comes to getting bugs fixed. For example, cell notes became badly broken in oocalc 2.x because they no longer move when their cells are moved (e.g. by sorting). The bug [openoffice.org] (yes, I filed it and I am biased) has remained open for nearly two years, and the developers have classified it as an "enhancement" rather than a "defect" even though it worked fine in version 1.x and is apparently causing problems for quite a few people with no work-around. I don't mean to whine, but leaving such obvious and problematic bugs unfixed for so long isn't good for the project. I don't know if this happens because they are understaffed or if there is a problem with how things are being managed, but getting the OOo people to pay attention to bugs seems to be a problem.

Switching theses

Not according to some participants in the 'open' source project itself, they say the biggest problem with OO.o is the fact that Sun codes, owns & makes all key decisions for the project when it should be more community oriented. A professor who participates in the project itself said 'enough developers are frustrated by both the technical and the organizational infrastructure at OpenOffice.org' and cites this as 'a real problem that is weighing on the project.' Other members of the community agree like Michael Meeks who asked 'At what fraction of the community will Sun reconsider its demand for ownership of the entirety of OpenOffice.org?' Hopefully with IBM's entrance into OO.o participation we will see the product become more community controlled & accessible.

Am I the only one to see the problem here? OOo is, supposedly, troubled by the fact that Sun codes it, so the "solution" is to have IBM code it?

IBM is not the community. IBM is not even a company well known for open sourcing anything. In fact, they were the first IT company to be investigated for monopoly abuse, back in the day... Once they opensource AIX, and start playing nice, I'll consider them again. For now Sun is much more trustworthy than IBM.

Future of OO.o

The future of OpenOffice.org most probably lies in a straight-GPL fork (which is allowed, since one of the licences under which OO.o is distributed is the LGPL -- and the LGPL allows for any work covered by that licence to be relicenced under the full GPL).

As a consequence of a recent EU ruling, Microsoft will soon have to be releasing documentation of their proprietary file formats. If a library is written for properly parsing these, in good time, and released under the full GPL (not the craven "yoohoo-guys-here's-my-arse" LGPL with its attendant pandering to the closed-source brigade) then this will help true Free Software projects and thwart Open Source pretenders.

The only ones who have anything to lose are the StarOffice people with their proprietary, closed fork and I say good riddance to them.

I think the only thing Sun could do wrong...

...that would actually lead to a revolt is if they clearly cripple OpenOffice so that they can sell StarOffice. Even with the most dysfunctional management, the golden rule applies. And Sun has the gold paying for a lot of developers. Almost all the cases I can remember where the community took over the company was dead or dying, or the project was being abandoned. I think they'll come around the more people that share the effort (in forms of money or code, really), because they'd be fools to let this slip away from them.

Sun is the biggest problem?

Weird.... why is it then that other projects like AbiWord, KOffice and the various other open source office utilities haven't taken over the market?

The main problem is OpenOffice isn't 100% compatible with MS Office documents. I have tried using Openoffice as a replacement to MS Word and Excel several times. Each time I end up getting burned because some executive pencil pusher thinks my layout sucked and looked bad. So in my attempt to use OpenOffice, I end up looking like a moron.

SO sure, I can use openoffice for my own documents, and then open it in Word or excel and format it completely when giving it to others, but comon. I don't have enough hours in the day to use something just to "stick it to microsoft", because honestly, the company I work for already has site licenses for Office and all othe