Intentional or Coincidence
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Abe Dec 10, 2005 10:44 AM EDT |
Why OpenOffice and why now? OOo is a critical pillar of FOSS but in no way represents the whole FOSS movement. Not in the development process and not in the quality of code. The development is still being heavily influenced by Sun ( proprietary ). The code originated from Star Office (proprietary) but was cleaned up quite a bit but not all of it. So what is his point? Considering all the features it furnishes, the level of compatibility with MS Office, and its availability for many systems and languages, OpenOffice is not too bad at all. Actually it is good enough to make MS worried silly and forcing it to scramble in all directions using its normal trickery, deviousness, and its financial and political influence to discredit it. MS does that every time since its technical competitiveness is never good enough and wants to be sure to cover all bases. These guys wrote the book on how to eliminate competition. OpenOffice has bloat that is not avoidable at this point. If the bloat he is talking about is in the code like he says, I am sure it can and will be taken care of easily. I don't care what his previous associations were, this guy is on something he never had before. |
| dinotrac Dec 10, 2005 11:30 AM EDT |
One interesting question: Is OO more buggy than MS-Office, or does the open nature of OO development make it easier to quantify the bugs? The guy is right about a number of things, at least with specific reference to OO -- it has not attracted a legion of developers to the code base. But then, OO is not your model Open Source project. It is "opened-up" proprietary code, and not easy code to learn. In years to come, OO v Mozilla will be an interesting comparison. Mozilla through out the baby with the bath water and started from scratch. We now see a pretty spiffy browser -- Firefox -- making a dent in IE's dominance, but... We're talking about blowing horns and throwing parties over 10% penetration. The old "failed" unviable Netscape still had three times that much market share when it's code base got tossed. One could make the case that Mozilla gave the internet to Microsoft and, in the process, needs to share the blame every time we rail at lazy web developers who make Microsoft-only web sites. With OpenDocument in the news, Linux making headway, and an alternative desktop looking more realistic all the time, this hardly seems the time to declare the present OO dead, and throw all one's energy into a "new and improved" version that can be good to go in five years' time. So...better a good product than a great Open Source project. |
| richo123 Dec 10, 2005 12:30 PM EDT |
My thoughts on this issue is that code maturity is the issue. Oo has undergone a ton of changes in the last 3 years or so and it is going to take a rather a lot of work from the devs and user base to shake all the bugs out. I have also been frustrated by these bugs at times and have resorted to staroffice at times. Personally I mainly use lyx for word processing which is much more mature and has not changed a lot in recent years. As a result most of the nasty bugs have been shaken out. It is close to being rock solid in my experience. I cannot remember the last time I was hit by a bug. The contrast with proprietary software is instructive. They need it to be relatively major bug free at release or else they will hear from paying customers. However once the "suckers" are on board there is little further incentive for improvement short of another major release and more user cash injection. The open source improvement model is much more gradual than this. Give Oo another couple of years and it will either disappear or else all this complaining will be over and it will be widely used. |
| cjcox Dec 13, 2005 12:12 PM EDT |
I used to be huge fan of StarOffice (before the evil take over). I was initially delighted when Sun bought it and made it free (sort of... I guess freeer). But Sun showed me that money can buy you love when they made the golden hand shake with Balmer. Koffice looks pretty good. I know... I know... Qt.. evil.. whatever.... but still.... Apps on my worry list: 1. OOo (because of its tight ties to Sun) 2. Apache (because the development model of Apache2 makes you actually desire Apache1 again). 3. BIND (I'd really like to see a good GPL DNS... I guess one could take BIND and create a GPL fork... but maybe it's time for something better... ISC DHCPD as well). 4. Mozilla/Firefox (The combination of Firefox and Thuderbird seems to be a much bigger footprint than old Mozilla and Mozilla Mail... what was the whole point of this again?? I think someone can do much, much, much, much, much better than Firefox and its distant cousin Thunderbird. I like Konqueror better, but it crashes way to often. Nicely integrated, good app transparency (though I'm not a lover of Kmail)... quite a few usage issues... but all in all, has good potential.) Sorry if this takes the thread WAY off topic.... |
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