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Michael Meeks Says OO.o Project is "Profoundly Sick"
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Dec 28, 2008 07:32 AM
from the important-alternative dept.
from the important-alternative dept.
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.'"
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But isn't that the idea? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:But isn't that the idea? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:But isn't that the idea? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Re:But isn't that the idea? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Stagnating? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Barriers to Entry (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
"Finished" software (Score:5, Interesting)
Novell "profoundly sick" (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Very bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Too complex (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:It's 2009 (Score:5, Interesting)
The statistics in the article are interesting, but its conclusion isn't:
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.
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Re:It's 2009 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:It's 2009 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:It's 2009 (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:It's 2009 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
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Re:It's 2009 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:It's 2009 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [businessweek.com] espionage [theregister.co.uk] fresh in the collective memory, including ECHELON [wikipedia.org], 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.
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OpenOffice.org is LGPL (Score:5, Informative)
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 [openoffice.org], 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.
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Re:That's because there DONE! (Score:5, Informative)
How about fixing some of the 12058 [openoffice.org] open bugs?
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Re:That's because there DONE! (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [openoffice.org] 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 [openoffice.org] and 2008 [openoffice.org]; 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?
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Re:OOo versus MS Office? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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