Linked by Rahul on Sat 11th Oct 2008 01:39 UTC
Michael Meeks who leads the OpenOffice.org development team within Novell has taken a
detailed look at contributions associated by metrics to OpenOffice.org and makes the case that Sun's tight control over the codebase and the lack of enough volunteer contributors leaves the development slowly stagnating over a period of time. Michael Meeks has recently started strongly advocating the position that Sun needs to setup a more independent OpenOffice.org foundation or otherwise allow more relaxed policies for commit access and be less rigid about assignment of copyright to itself for the development community of Openoffice.org to thrive beyond Sun developers.
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Member since:2005-07-06
As an outside observer the development does seem slow - Ooo has not yet got the functionality of MS Office 2000, Although for many tasks Ooo is adequate it's not as good as it should be.
When there are only two companies actually working full time on it - are you surprised? Novell and Sun are doing as much as they can with the limited resources - its time for the vendors who do bundle it with their respective distributions to actually allocate some man/person power to the project.
Member since:2006-03-05
Well, there is only one company working on MS Office, too, and there's only one company working on iWork 
. But it looks as if Sun is slowly downscaling their development effort on OOo, and OOo is unlikely to be ever a popular project for volunteers to work on, even if it became truly open and community oriented, because of the size and complexity of the codebase, the weirdness of the buildsystem, the amount of unfamiliar technologies used -- technologies that are only used in OOo. But then, as a KOffice developer, I _would_ say that, wouldn't I :-)
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Member since:
2006-02-22
As an outside observer the development does seem slow - Ooo has not yet got the functionality of MS Office 2000, Although for many tasks Ooo is adequate it's not as good as it should be.
Edited 2008-10-11 06:55 UTC