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:2005-10-18
Oh, since I now have a chance to talk to an actual KOffice developer: are there plans to seriously boost MS compatibility, now that MS released their format specs? (Also, you could reuse OOo filters, but it's possible to do better than that, as far as I can judge by Softmaker Office.)
Member since:2006-03-05
No. There simply aren't enough developers around to work on that. We had one student in the google summer of code who worked on improved .doc support -- mainly images -- but it's just not feasible to support the MS formats fully, either binary or xml -- they are too big, too MS-specific, too much encumbered with things like "do this like Word 95" or "enumeration of copyrighted border decorations"
Besides, with MS promising to start supporting ODF fully before supporting the OOXML "standard", we don't have to :-)
Member since:2005-07-06
. 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 :-) There are two companies - I don't know why you turned the fact I said there are two companies into some sort of lynch pin to your whole argument. The fact of the matter is that there are limited resources to not only maintain OpenOffice.org/StarOffice for existing Novell/Sun customers as well as using those same programmers to ad features to OpenOffice.org as well.
Its a whole lot more complex than releasing a piece of software - you have to release it, maintain it, ship updates, test those updates for regressions. Then then there is maintaining those releases from the past. You've released 2.4 but there are customers still using 2.3 - so you'll need to maintain that as well. Again, it isn't as simple as you make out.
As for OpenOffice.org, there needs to be resources, but like I said, the two major players are doing as much as they can - where is Red Hat? why can't they allocate 10 full time programmers? or has their 'giving up on the desktop' reached as so far as not even helping with desktop oriented opensource products? what about Ubuntu - where is their contribution outside distribution specific bugs?
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 :-)