The Uncertain Future of OpenOffice.org 259
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... (Score:5, Funny)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In order... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Linus controls the kernel. Mozilla controls firefox.
Yes.
At absolutely no time is Linus or Mozilla at the whim of the community. The directions of the products will absolutely be to the needs of the respective controlling body
Umm, partly true. Linus listens to the community, that's what the LKML is all about. Is he at the community's whim? No. Does he accept input from others and make decisions that will be of the most benefit to the community? Yes.
The same more or less holds true for Mozilla. Mozilla is not a money-making venture. Their sole purpose is to make Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird and related technologies available to the community. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. What other agenda could they
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And FYI the Mozilla Foundation has something like $40 Million USD a year in revenue via the Mozilla Corporation. Staffers receive paychecks. The fact that the Mozilla Foundation is a 503 and controlling the for-profit Mozilla Corporation surely demonstrates that they have int
Re:In order... (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Dont think so. (Score:2)
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(people that have no clue, go look for Firefox and Thunderbird and Mozilla in Debian)
Re:Dont think so. (Score:5, Funny)
or OfficeWeasel?
Kind of has a ring to it ... sort of like calling Major Frank Burns (M*A*S*H) ferret-face.
Most important question about OO (Score:2)
---
Once it can do that, it's good enough (oh, and I have it on 3 new desktops since it came with Ubuntu, 1 desktop went to my parents, one to my wife's family and we use the last one. I like it, I think it'll blend.)
Re:Dont think so. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Dont think so. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Now if KOffice was gplv3, it would have been PERFECT
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For projects on this scale, "eventually" is the key word here.
How much time and how much money has Sun spent to gain Star Office / Open Office minimum credibility as an alternative office suite?
Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Respectful criticism, thank you! (Score:2)
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Informative)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun gets bad press for developing free software...
Tough crowd.
You must be new here (only Apple,Google=good) (Score:4, Interesting)
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Lets see ... I must be doubly evil, since I'm running openSUSE both at home and the office ... and don't have a single piece of apple gear.
Sun isn't perfect, and neither are Novell, but they've done some of the major heavy lifting, and we should try to sound bit more appreciative, because we're not perfect either.
Otherwise, we just end up sounding like a bunch of fickle myspace bloggers.
Crap - a four-digiter speaks! (Score:2)
Holy crap, a four-digiter! You must remember the lost time when the articles here were more than just corporate press releases.
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It was really the most efficient technology news discussion system around. 1 - Post woefully flawed tidbit on upcoming t
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Sun uses OO.org in their star office and shares some developments between the two. It makes sense that they want to keep some resemblance of control in order to maintain control of Star office development. When asking if the community should control it more then Sun, you have to answer the question of who is the community. By most definitions it would be everyone participating in open source software but depending on w
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The user is just as important as the code contributers in many respects. If you alienate them, there goes the steam behind your project. So while I do agree that the contributers should have some say, their say should be be in tune with the people using the program. The process just falls apart and there is no community if you create something that no one uses.
Sun on the other hand,
Re:Damned if you do... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
And the "greatest understatement of the year" award goes to.... *drum rolls*
Re:Damned if you do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some could successfully argue that Firefox contains a HUGE amount of UI work. The entire app is one large UI system.
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> > 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.
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Let me see if I am getting this straight. You wrote a java script app that makes 1500 XHRs and keeps appending data to the end of the page and you are complaining about how FF is handling that. Is that your claim more or less? Here is my reaction.
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I can think of a few closed source that are. Does any OS GUI implement modern Gui technique's? How about implementing good human interface techniques that have been thought about, but computers haven't been powerful enough to implement?
OSX does. No I don't own a Mac.
Has there been any human interface innovations at all on the OS community? The potential is there, and I would like to see some, but based on the track record it doesn't see
Re:Damned if you do... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Photoshop's target is the professional photographer, the production house, where it has for all practical purposes a 100% share of the market.
The GIMP competes at the level of Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop Elements, Paint.NET, etc.
Windows and OSX both have ... issues ... in particular the fact that there are two desktops f
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As an aside, out of the products you mentioned, only Photoshop Elements runs on Mac. It is not really suitable for even casual work such as creating an icon or personal web site logo. Rather, it's only useful for retouching photos.
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Definitely, except I'd say those times are all the time. The processes of gathering input and making decisions may look different in open source vs. proprietary devlopment, but both can support either design-by-committee or benevolent-dictators. The quality o
Obligitory Highlander response... (Score:2)
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I am sure that some people are frustrated. I know as a user I am frustrated over some of OOs short comings.
However I think it is a pretty dang good system so far.
Crying wolf.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't think it's even a panic piece. The "uncertain future" isn't whether it will be developed or not. It's just uncertain how much control Sun will maintain, and whether developers displeased with Sun will bother to make a fork.
Either way, OpenOffice will continue to exist, continue to be developed, and continue to be used.
Biggest threat? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
When they do that, it'll just mean that OpenOffice.org is ready for primetime.
Re:Biggest threat? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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I doubt MS wants to legitimize OOo in that way. Even more importantly, I don't think MS wants to risk having their dubious patents nullified in a court. They'd much rather rely on their expertise as FUDsters and the threat of patent litigation to try to derail OOo. Actually going through with that threat is a huge gamble that MS probably doesn't want to risk unless absolutely necessary.
Ergocracy (Score:4, Interesting)
still a dinosaur at the end of the day (Score:2)
For those commenting on how "someone needs to be in charge" in order for true innovation to happen (esp. around the GUI), I would point out that it hasn't worked so far. IMO open source programming is good for
Diffuse or Focused? (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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Last time I wanted to do some development on openoffice (some years ago) the documentation was amazing.
Perhaps this explains a few things... (Score:2)
Management is getting in the way of simple upgrades and additions?
Never worked for a company like that before.
cough cough
Sun Bashing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sun Bashing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Sun Bashing (Score:4, Informative)
That being said, watch as I get modded down massively.
Can anyone... (Score:3, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Run the Windows version inside of Crossover or Wine.
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why OOo uses its own inbuilt font rendering and toolkit? Aren't these things already provided by all modern guest OS's?
Part of it is historical. The StarOffice codebase dates back to 1994. The target platforms at the time were things like Windows 3.1 and early X11 environments on systems like Solaris. The font rendering situation on Windows wasn't too bad, but on X11 it was terrible. Fonts were stored on the X server, which made it impossible to use ones installed with the app on a remote X session, and they didn't provide enough information to the application for proper kerning. The solution to this was to do the fon
Then fork (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Illogic (Score:2)
Seriously, they would have to shut the site down or sumting.
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The reason people say "there's the source, fix it yourself" is because they aren't your slaves. They don't have to work for you without getting paid. If you want to have some influence in the product's development take a substan
Re:Then fork (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If like you said, your car's breaks don't work, you have a right to get it fixed because you PAID for it.
In an Open Source project, people have an obligation to complain about problems and devs have an "OPTION" to fix it. They're not obligated to fix it. You don't put food on their table!
So if you do want support maybe you should buy a copy of StarOffice, which gives you a support channel, and get your fixes. But please don't complain that somebody won't fix what they anyways provide
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If the brakes on the care you *PAID FOR* don't work, you have a valid complaint. Hell, you can even take it to a court of law and receive renumeration for your complaint. You may even be championed as a hero in some cases.
However, complaining about a gift could possibly earn you the title of "ingrate". OpenOff
Proof is in the pudding...and it's ready to eat (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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I think you make an excellent point about the forking. In spite of what so many Slashbots say, I am never annoyed by the startup time or memory overhead of NeoOffice. Your efforts have given me ( and several other "switchers" I've influenced ) a hugely useful product that does pretty much exactly what I need and does it ver
You have my gratitude ( and my donation to back it up ). I am always amazed at how many people will try to discredit your efforts by complaining about a few extra seconds of their l
Tell me about open source... (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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.
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Not a popular position here, but I'm forced to agree.
I'm genuinely glad that there is an Open Office and people who work
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And, not to put too fine a point on it, represents the largest jump made by Office since Office '97. Outlook changed a fair bit in UI terms over that time, but everything else was just relatively minor stuff like "Let's change the colour of this icon, add a few minor features there, change the colo
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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.
LOTUS SMARTSUITE? (Score:3, Funny)
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http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/18/1155252 [slashdot.org]
The beta is available for download here: https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/swerplotus/LotusSymphonyPick.html [ibm.com]
You'll need to register to get a copy, however.
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IBM is SQUANDERING good code, it appears.
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It wouldn't hurt IBM to:
1. Provide internal or 2-4 trusted collaborating Open Source developer teams a locked-down (no binaries accessible as code to programmers, say, locked on tamper-evide
Perhaps if ... (Score:2)
Something is wrong - bugs not fixed (Score:3, Interesting)
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Almost the same story with me. The solution is to fix the bug [openoffice.org] yourself.
That's great if you can pull it off, but isn't terribly practical in a lot of cases. The bug I reported probably requires tweaking a large cross section of code (every action that moves a cell, or perhaps the code that maps the data to the display). To familiarize myself with such a huge piece of source code, find the parts that need to be changed, fix them, and test, would probably take me at least 100 times longer to do than someone who wrote the code or is already familiar with it. Plus, there would
Future of OO.o (Score:2)
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 "yooho
I think the only thing Sun could do wrong... (Score:2)
Sun is the biggest problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 other microsoft products. So in reality my attempt to use Open Office won't ever "stick it to microsoft".
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Microsoft Office is not 100% cross-version compatible and does sometimes get some formatting wrong. However, it would be reasonable to say it's 99% cross-version formatting compatible. In other words, yes there are issues but unless you're doing some very fancy work in a part of Office which was never really designed for it (like doing a database with many tables,
The problem is it needs to be better (Score:4, Insightful)
If material cost were not an issue, now or ever, who would pick OO over MS Office? All OO is, and will be in the forseeable future, is the bastard wannabe kid brother of MS Unfortunately, Exchange is in the mix, too, because of the links between the office suite, email, and intranet. Where's the open source initiative to create a *better* solution than the MS Exchange environment? Everyone just focuses on Exchange compatibility, and as long as you do that, you're perpetually going to be playing catch up.
Really, they should start from the ground up, and create a whole new office app/email app/email backend. Whose goal is to be *better* than the competition instead of a cheap or free alternative. That is, if anyone really wants to try and supplant MS's share. Just my $.02.
You miss the goal of OO.o/StarOffice (Score:3, Interesting)
If ALL Sun accomplished with StarOffice was getting a few Microsoft Site licenses to use it as leverage to pay Microsoft less money, Sun "won." If you see the world
IBM good, but not for "community" (Score:3, Insightful)
Taking some of the control from Sun, and having IBM give in some effort and direction will mean the product can only get better. Wresting control from them and doing a design-by-committee open-source movement might fundamentally destroy the package.
There are only very few projects which have been spawned from a commercial development and moved to a true open source, open development and open community design model and survived with a great product. One might say Firefox is one of them, but would it have even gotten there if Netscape/AOL hadn't been pushing their buttons to produce browsers? It's perfectly possible that, given the way most open source projects are run, we would still be running Mozilla 1.8 beta right now and Firefox would never have been spawned from it.
I guess, if you want to fork Open Office, you're free to. Go ahead, make Open Open Office and see how far you get. The best parts of it might be rolled into Lotus Suite and Star Office, or.. they might not.
the problem is that sun lacks competence (Score:3, Interesting)
The simple reality is that Sun historically has done a less than great job designing and implementing user interfaces for end users. It's true for netbeans; solaris; Java and indeed open office that each of these products has a very long history of quirky, non standard user interfaces that pale to competing products. In all these products progress has been made. Basically solaris now sports a nice Gnome desktop (but they took their time killing their old UI), netbeans is undergowing the zillionth lets "fix the UI" effort, Java did great on the serverside but so far failed to get people enthousiastic on the desktop side (JavaFX being the latest misguided/doomed effort).
The Open office UI looks out of place on any platform. Ugly icons; weird fonts; clumsy stuff like the cross references dialog or the poor excuse for a bibliography manager. Yes you can sort of do most office related stuff in it and for most people that is enough. Sun has been fighting the symptoms for years and they seem to be pretty proud of their work. The truth however is that the overall Sun UI experience is mediocre or adequate at best across their product line.
What open office needs is somebody like Blake Ross to kick out the old UI and do a proper one. Blake and friends rescued the quirky mozilla from the fate that OOo is now facing: being a second choice cheap product that people use for cost rather than quality.
Name is a drag (Score:2)
YES (Score:4, Interesting)
I got involved in a minor way with a certain open-source project which shall remain nameless. A co-worker of mine, however, put a lot more into it. The "leader" of the project, who ran the SVN server and merged the code and the like, pretty much had full control over what was included into the project. The problem is, the guy was arrogant, spiteful, and himself a terrible coder.
My co-worker submitted a change to the core code that increased its speed in some cases by as much as 100 times. However, the "project leader" apparently did not like his own code being fiddled with. (He had written the module containing the inefficient code.) At first he rejected the code changes, saying that he "did not like the coding style". Then, he incorporated the code changes incorrectly, which broke a lot of other things. Then, when he finally merged the code correctly, he publicly derided it for causing errors, when in fact the errors were in completely different parts of the program and he knew that.. and which was later demonstrated, also publicly. Did he ever apologize? Hell no. He cut the contributor off from the project, and me as well when I spoke up about this.
In short, the guy was a real ass. I am glad he was not my boss at work or something. I would probably punch him in the nose and walk out. He was completely unsuited for "leading" a "team effort".
Excuse me (Score:2)
naw (Score:4, Funny)
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Adding more people to a late project will make it later.
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What, Apache? oh you must mean Linux? Bsd?
Most successful open source project my ass.
"Is is just me or have we not seen a large increase in astroturf shilling recently ?"
Nope, just you.
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So they are moving away from Java?
ZING!