Andrew Brown's article on OpenOffice [LWN.net]

From:		Alastair Stevens <alastair-AT-altrux.me.uk>
To:		tech-AT-guardian.co.uk, letters-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		Andrew Brown's article on OpenOffice
Date:		Thu, 08 Dec 2005 22:51:35 +0000

Dear Sirs

I have just read Andrew Brown's musings on OpenOffice* in this week's
technology supplement, and I'm compelled to disagree with his conclusions.

I'm been an OpenOffice user for some years myself, and I agree that it
has its major flaws, and that its development pace is more glacial than
many would like.  However, it is well known that the open source model
doesn't always work well for certain classes of software, this being one
of them.  That conclusion is nothing new.

But to generalise it into a sweeping slur on the open source development
model is completely wrong.  Open source has more than proved itself in
the arena of infrastructure software; after all, vast portions of the
Internet's servers have run on it for years.  There are countless
examples of open source projects powered by a healthy and active
community of participants, which produce rapidly-maturing, stable and
remarkably bug-free products.

OpenOffice is a unique project, with lofty challenges and daunting
goals; but to paint its shortcomings onto the entire, vast open source
movement is deeply misleading.

Yours etc
Alastair Stevens
Cambridge, UK

* http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,16376,166...


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Andrew Brown's article on OpenOffice

Posted Dec 18, 2005 7:56 UTC (Sun) by beejaybee (guest, #1581) [Link]

"its development pace is more glacial than
many would like"

Open Office (like MS Office) is already _too_ overloaded with bells & whistles. Real users need something that is really usable. OO fills that role reasonably well already - apart from bugfixes, do we really need "development"?

If automobile engineers followed fashion the way that software designers do, next year's models would have square wheels.

Once a tool is reasonably mature, it doesn't need further development.

Development of office products

Posted Dec 18, 2005 11:43 UTC (Sun) by dps (subscriber, #5725) [Link]

Actually there is a serious hole in all office suites I am aware of, namely all of the are designed for solely human use. A really compelling feature that should not be imposisble would be a *non GUI* interface that a program could use to create and format a document based on a template.

At presetn *TeX and [nt]roff are infinitely easier for program to use that any office suite whatsoever, but it could be (very convincingly) agrued neither is ideally for some sorts of documents that programs are likely to generate.

Ideally it would be easy to make "download letters/bills/application forms" link on a webpage easy to implement. Developers of web applications eveyrwhere want this (esp. if the format can be imported into M$ word without the M$ office users noticing anything).

Development of office products

Posted Dec 19, 2005 16:14 UTC (Mon) by borthner (guest, #4277) [Link]

Actually, the XML file format for OpenOffice makes something like this quite possible. I have done booklets of 100+ pages with significant formatting generated by PHP scripts manipulating raw text and adding tags from a template. It's not simple, by any means, but it is possible, which is much more than I can say for the Microsoft binary blob formats used in the Microsoft office suite.