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: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:2008-07-15
Well, at least you're being honest, but let me translate your comment into what Joe Sixpack is going to take from it:
Um, it's too hard and boring and we really don't want to, and you don't really need that anyway. ODF is better anyhow.
This is not what you said, and I'm not implying that it is what you said, but it is how many people will read it, and unfortunately that's a bad image to portray.
As for MS supporting ODF fully, I'm on the fence. They could surprise us and actually implement the ODF standard properly, but we could also wind up with ODF an MS ODF, rather like the RTF situation. And what do we do then, I wonder? Unfortunately given MS's track record of supporting "standards" I'm really not holding my breath for standard ODF. But who knows, there's a first time for everything.
Member since:2005-10-18
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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.)