Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org [LWN.net]

Michael Meeks has taken a detailed look at contributions to OpenOffice.org and come away worried. "Crude as they are - the statistics show a picture of slow disengagement by Sun, combined with a spectacular lack of growth in the developer community. In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition - we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux's recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective."

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Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 10, 2008 15:16 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (3 responses)

I'm not particularly surprised. Combine Sun's prior stranglehold on feature approval with a massively huge and complex beast of a platform that is extremely hard for anybody to grok, and you've got a recipe for poor volunteer uptake.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 12, 2008 16:53 UTC (Sun) by newlinuxuser (guest, #54650) [Link] (2 responses)

On the Novell website, there is a page dedicated to the company's Distinguished Engineers. One of these is Michael Meeks, a Cambridge graduate who began his Linux career at GNOME desktop start-up Ximian, and now works as part of Novell's OpenOffice.org team.

http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/184

Nothing new...same old saga of Novell sponsored by Microsoft attacking Sun and Free software just before the release of Open Office 3

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 12, 2008 20:09 UTC (Sun) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link]

The interview is over two years old, so what can it possibly have to do with "the release
of Open Office 3"? Assuming you mean OpenOffice.org 3

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 13, 2008 16:54 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Why post the same thing twice? Especially as you're only trolling/implicating things?

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 10, 2008 15:42 UTC (Fri) by massysett (guest, #52736) [Link]

The author says the solution is, essentially, to make OOo better. I wonder if something entirely different will happen: marginalization of OOo in favor of Abiword, Gnumeric, KOffice, or something else. Currently OOo is the most feature-packed of these, but if adding to OOo is truly so hard, maybe it is better to use something else instead. Or maybe Google Docs will supplant all of them (RMS is shuddering.)

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 10, 2008 15:49 UTC (Fri) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] (12 responses)

OO.o is not "sexy" for developers. What itch does it scratch what a "real programmer" would need it for and therefore improve it? I write my documents (papers, presentations) in LaTeX, using LyX as frontend if appropriate. I draw my graphics still in xfig (inkscape would be an option, if the developers would care more about technical drawings, like better grid, component library, better arrows, and especially a user interface which doesn't hide this deep in the attic, etc.), I render my diagrams with gnuplot. And I can quickly write programs that massage data much better than a spreadsheet. I tried oocalc for that purpose, but it's sluggish when drawing graphics, and it's such a repetitive task to make the calculations - I won't do that again (this is a fundamental design flaw in how spreadsheets work).

Furthermore, a lot about OO.o is to make it work with Microsoft's so-called "document formats". This affects design decisions within how OO.o works - and especially affected them in the past. Reading and writing a format full of cruft and legacy already makes a program bloated and full of legacy, not a fun to work with.

IMHO when you dump a load of formerly proprietary code onto the free software community, it won't take off. Or at least it requires that everything is rewritten once or twice before people accept it (like Firefox).

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 10, 2008 19:12 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (7 responses)

The Linux kernel isn't sexy either. You need to reboot the system to activate changes, for starters. It's easy to completely hang your system. It has its own build system and its own set of libraries. The stack space is limited to 8k or even 4k.

Most of the contributors to the Linux kernel are corporates, not individuals. I suspect they do it not because the Linux kernel is sexy, but because fixing something or adding a new feature into the kernel would eventually help their business.

Now aren't there companies out there that need OOo improved?

Specifically, IBM is always mentioned as a big contributor to OOo.

As for "Scratching the itch": what's the rate of the presentations in recent Linux-related developers conferences that were made in OOo?

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 10, 2008 21:50 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (2 responses)

Most of the contributors to the Linux kernel are corporates, not individuals.

Are you sure? Checkout "Greg Kroah Hartman on the Linux Kernel" on video.google.com. About 24 minutes in there is a nice table of where the contributions really come from. Number 1 is "Amateurs"

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 10, 2008 23:01 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Yes, more precisely it was hobbyists or people whose organizations affiliations were unknown or they didn't want it disclosed followed by Red Hat, IBM, Novell and others. If you add those up, you can easily see that he large majority of contributions are from commercial organizations.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 11, 2008 5:11 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

No. 1 "contributor company" is "(None)". But those unaffiliated individuals are still responsible for only 15%-20% of the code. What about the rest?

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 12, 2008 20:15 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

How does that make the kernel not "sexy"? In terms of the original poster, the kernel is sexy because it's necessary and something that every developer uses. In my terms, it's sexy because there's nothing quite like playing that close to the hardware. All those limitations add to it being sexy; there's no room to drop a megabyte array on the stack, you can't just toss in libbloat to simplify a problem, if you screw up, it's going to crash your system and possibly trash your filesystems to boot. Difficult and dangerous is very much sexy.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 13, 2008 8:30 UTC (Mon) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] (2 responses)

what's the rate of the presentations in recent Linux-related developers conferences that were made in OOo?

Well, those are made by the people who didn't master LaTeX beamer ;-). Last time I saw a presentation from a RedHat employee (a gray-bearded man with a pony tail), it was made with PowerPoint. People who do this sort of things are happy even with the limitations their tool provides. If you stop being happy with ooimpress or PowerPoint, you first look around if there's something better, something that makes your presentations look more professional (and that certainly doesn't mean "more silly animated effects"), and quicker to create.

My conclusion is that when you want to write a new "office suite" from scratch as free software, first make a good extensible typesetting and drawing engine ([La]TeX has some limitations, so be better than that - especially the programming language it uses is a nightmare; PostScript as drawing engine is not perfect, either). The user interfaces for the different programs should be frontends to this engine; they need to be extensible, as well (packages for the typesetting engine need to tell the GUI something, too). Make sure that writing an extension is easy, and that the foundation is stable and sane so that most of the work goes to writing extensions. Concentrate on good practice, don't try to imitate the bad user interface of the competition.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 16, 2008 14:15 UTC (Thu) by kamil (guest, #3802) [Link] (1 responses)

No offense meant, but I think you must be very young...

I'm with you on the use of LaTeX for document writing. I too use gnuplot for my graphs, but I did switch from xfig to inkscape (the GUI of the former would drive me nuts).

I made a few presentations in LaTeX, but then I switched to OOo. Why? Because of issues with sharing. Slides are shared a lot more than documents. In a collaborative environment (aren't they all?), people exchange slides from each others' presentations all the time. Unless you don't have any co-workers, or they are all as huge LaTeX fans as you are (in my experience, unlikely, even among programmers), using something radically different for your slides than the rest of the crew is a big PITA. OOo is close enough to PowerPoint to make importing and exporting practical, and that really helps.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 25, 2008 16:27 UTC (Sat) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

I also use LaTeX for presentations, and my approach to the sharing slides problem is to first convert other people's slides to PDF (if they aren't already in PDF), then create a Makefile that uses GhostScript to splice and reweave the output of SLiTeX with the slides I want to import.

If someone wants to use my slides in PowerPoint ... well, they have the PDF, and PowerPoint can import PDFs as images at least, right?

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 10, 2008 22:18 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Furthermore, a lot about OO.o is to make it work with Microsoft's so-called "document formats". This affects design decisions within how OO.o works - and especially affected them in the past. Reading and writing a format full of cruft and legacy already makes a program bloated and full of legacy, not a fun to work with.

And that explains only too clearly why I dislike OOo (and PAY to have a copy of WordPerfect on my system - that said, I don't particularly like the new versions of WP - ever since the v9 rewrite!). I find Word a counter-intuitive mess, and I find OOo too similar to Word for comfort (and WP is moving ever closer to Word :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 11, 2008 0:31 UTC (Sat) by jasonjgw (subscriber, #52080) [Link]

The only circumstance in which I would consider using OpenOffice.org is that
requiring collaborative editing of a document with a user of Microsoft Office.
I am glad OO.O exists for those people who need such interoperability, and I
would use it should collaboration with MS-Word users become necessary.

However, having experienced the benefits of LaTeX for a decade now, I don't
want to go back to using a word processor, which would be a big step in the
wrong direction. I also suspect that the barrier for entry into LaTeX macro
package development, for instance, is lower than that of OpenOffice
development.

Important lessons ought to be learned here. The next major typesetting and
document processing system needs to be designed with extensibility and
flexibility in mind, so that it can attract extensions and improvements just
as TeX, Emacs and Mozilla do. A graphical interface should be optional, as it
is in the TeX environment. Interoperability with HTML and XML will be more
important in the future than legacy, binary formats issuing from Redmond,
Washington.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 11, 2008 5:15 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

If one wants to scratch an itch with OpenOffice, one may find it simpler to write an extension:

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/

So I suspect the statistics would not be complete without looking at the extensions.

Is there any effort to co-maintain most of them together with OOo? Compare that to external kernel modules and to Firefox plugins.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 11, 2008 8:04 UTC (Sat) by robilad (guest, #27163) [Link]

<quote>Or at least it requires that everything is rewritten once or twice before people accept it (like Firefox).</quote>

Spot on.

I'd suspect that the reason for the Linux kernel code churn lies in part in encouraging rewrites of existing functionality to make sure new generations of maintainers & developers have code sections they feel attached to very quickly. And it works. ;)

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 10, 2008 15:49 UTC (Fri) by oska (guest, #25556) [Link] (2 responses)

I would suggest breaking up OpenOffice.org into its constituent applications. Having an application suite makes no sense except as a (very successful) market grabbing technique for proprietary software. This is where ppl got apps as part of a package deal and thus didn't buy the competitor's solitary apps. For free as in beer software it makes no sense.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 11, 2008 16:21 UTC (Sat) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (1 responses)

An astute observation, and overall good idea.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 11, 2008 22:26 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

I have maligned the Mozilla suite quite often in the past, but in the case of office suites there is a huge difference: you need some way to make compound documents that work. People want to integrate spreadsheets into text documents, export their databases into spreadsheets, be able to give nice formats to spreadsheet cells and so on. In other words: most people can't tell why their data doesn't work in a different application. Without a suite you are left with huge mountains of repeated code that doesn't interoperate.

Office is much better in that respect than it was 10 years ago. OOo is not. It makes sense for Free software to use libraries for common code, where it makes sense, so a "suite" like KOffice is probably a good idea.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 10, 2008 15:59 UTC (Fri) by gouyou (guest, #30290) [Link] (2 responses)

It may be time for Sun to stop holding the grip on the project and integrate people from the forks: go-oo, oxygen, ...

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 11, 2008 15:16 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Is the guy even taking into account things like Go-oo?

It seems that is were most of the active development takes place and is the one Debian and other distributions actually use.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 14, 2008 15:34 UTC (Tue) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

I thought that he was the main maintainer of go-oo...

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 10, 2008 16:08 UTC (Fri) by pyxis (guest, #15886) [Link]

I hope Sun 'll create an OpenOffice Foundation.

Give it OpenOffice code rights and let the community (yes, also the "commercial" side of the community) do the rest.

---
Stefano Spinucci

"Sun Sells Out Open Office to Microsoft"

Posted Oct 11, 2008 6:12 UTC (Sat) by stock (guest, #5849) [Link]

Ever since Microsoft shutup shut-up the rhetoric of Scott McNealy
with their ripoff fee of $2 billion, I knew that OpenOffice.org
was not parked in the right spot. And there was a hidden reason
that Microsoft went into the belly of the beast back then :

http://mailman.ibssnet.com/pipermail/thelinuxshow/2004-Se...

[Thelinuxshow] "Sun Sells Out Open Office to Microsoft"

Robert M. Stockmann thelinuxshow@mailman.ibssnet.com
Mon, 20 Sep 2004 00:35:09 +0200 (CEST)

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Hi,

on linuxelectrons the editors started a interesting thread :

"Sun Sells Out Open Office to Microsoft"
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php/20040914141417417

where they presumably state that Sun Sells Out Open Office to Microsoft.
I would say Sun has received a large amount of cash from Microsoft and in
return handed over to Microsoft the legal right to sue Anyone over
Open Office (Technology) except Sun itself.

Thats a typical pay-off deal?

There's a official SEC Filing on this at :
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/709519/00011931250...

"EX-10.109 6 dex10109.htm
LIMITED PATENT COVENANT AND STAND-STILL AGREEMENT DATED APRIL, 2004 ,
Exhibit 10.109
Sun and Microsoft Confidential "

in which i find the following two Sections interesting, and maybe
alarming :

"
IV. PROVISIONS RELATING TO OPEN OFFICE

1. Notwithstanding the other provisions of this Agreement, with respect
solely to the product developed by Sun and generally known as Open
Office, the Covenants of Section II above and the Releases of Section
III above shall apply fully to Sun but shall not apply to Authorized
Licensees of Open Office or any other third party. Accordingly,
Microsoft shall not be foreclosed by this Agreement from seeking
damages from Authorized Licensees of Open Office for copies of Open
Office made or acquired prior to the Effective Date of this Agreement.
Nor shall Microsoft be foreclosed from seeking any damages from Sun,
its Affiliates, Authorized Licensees or any third party for any copies
of Open Office made or deployed by a User after the Effective Date.

2. In the event that Microsoft elects to sue or otherwise seek recovery
from an Authorized Licensee of Open Office for copies thereof that were
made and deployed by a User prior to the Effective Date of this
Agreement ("Deployed Copies"), upon request, Microsoft agrees to
promptly reimburse Sun for any
"

"
V. PROVISIONS RELATING TO CLONE PRODUCTS AND FOUNDRY PRODUCTS

Clone Products and Foundry Products shall be treated under this
Agreement in the same manner as products until April 1, 2007, after
which they shall be treated in the same manner as Open Office.
"

Anyone with access to a lawyer to clarify this ?

Regards,

Robert
--
Robert M. Stockmann - RHCE
Network Engineer - UNIX/Linux Specialist
crashrecovery.org stock@stokkie.net

Build too painful

Posted Oct 11, 2008 14:29 UTC (Sat) by crow (guest, #96) [Link] (1 responses)

You're not going to attract developers when it takes several hours to build the code. If they redo their build system to be simpler and much faster, then it would be more attractive to developers to play with.

Build too painful

Posted Oct 12, 2008 5:16 UTC (Sun) by andikleen (guest, #39006) [Link]

The code base is just big and takes some time when rebuilt from
scratch. No good way around that.

But they have a prebuilt development kit. With that you only
need to recompile the parts that you're actually changing, the rest
is just reused from the download. That works because it is pretty
modular.

With projects of that size many of the old habits just don't scale
anymore. You'll have to live with that.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 12, 2008 7:23 UTC (Sun) by sgros (guest, #36440) [Link]

Pity OO is in such shape and I hope something will change. It's very important component of Linux desktop. It's also very important on Windows and MacOS X for people who don't want/can't buy M$ Office or as a transition step towards Linux desktop.

Now, there are alternatives. But face it, majority of people are used on something like Word, and they will NEVER use Latex or anything similar. So the facts that someone is using them, and that they are available, is totally irrelevant in this context. As for KOffice, Gnumeric, and similar, appart from lack of the features, how often have you heard someone is using them on M$ or Apple?

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 12, 2008 16:47 UTC (Sun) by newlinuxuser (guest, #54650) [Link] (1 responses)

Novell is attacking Open Office...

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 13, 2008 16:43 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

1. You don't provide any fact to back up your statement that Novell is attacking OO.org
2. Almost everyone knows Michael Meeks work on, as he works on OO.org.. really.. I hope that wasn't meant as an argument
3. Go troll somewhere else. I saw the exact same stuff on various sites

True Measurement of Success is I use it

Posted Oct 12, 2008 18:45 UTC (Sun) by dbmuse (guest, #54651) [Link] (2 responses)

I use OO at work. My employer supplies MSOffice but I avoid it. I use OO at home on my MAC. I
use it on Windows and Linux. Its better than MSOffice. This area of technology is a patent hot spot.
Sun needs to be careful. With MS buddies such as Novel trying to put VB and such in OO, its very
wise of Sun to triple check everything. I consider OO a success because of what it can do, how it
continues to improve and because I use and recommend it. I like Novel too, but since their deal
with the devil I have lost true trust in the Company. As an old CNE its sad sad to see Novel pushing
MS technology. I would of thought Novel would have used patents against MS who is the company
that truly ripped them off. Yes OO on MAC rocks. Thank you Sun. Thank you developers. One two
or however many there are.... :)

True Measurement of Success is I use it

Posted Oct 12, 2008 19:49 UTC (Sun) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link]

I am gratefull for the existance of OpenOffice too. I also see it used by quite a lot of people on Windows desktops. Altough I am not an office documents fan, I constantly need to exchange data with people using Microsoft formats, without OOO I would probably have to run a Windows session somehow.
While I find KWord very attractive and speedy, when it comes to doing work OOO is the tool to choose.

Another point is that I don't really need the latest and greatest features. Being functional, with a usable enough interface and bug-free is enough for an office application. Do not forget that in order to be compatible with everyone me and many other people always advise for using the old Word 97/XP format. ODF would just miss too many recipients; also, most Microsoft Office users I know are decent and considering enough not to send latest and greatest Microsoft formats to me. In many use cases, the world is not going to end if we don't use the latest and greatest technology.

I thank Sun for making this software available to us. As I said before, I know many Windows people using OOO. I think some corporate planning and avoiding open-source extremism makes OOO much more succesfull than other OSS projects, from the number of users p.o.v. at least, if not from that of the number of contributors.

True Measurement of Success is I use it

Posted Oct 12, 2008 20:13 UTC (Sun) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link]

So what in your eyes would be the problem with my girlfriend being actually able to open
and use certain Excel documents, she needs for her studying? Or more generally
speaking: with millions of potential users being able to open their existing
documents/applications?

Oh yes, of course. It's because of Novell's contributions on this sector. Same as why
the Linux kernel, X.org, KDE, Gnome, Evolution and many others are doomed and best
avoided...

OpenOffice is for users rather than developers

Posted Oct 12, 2008 21:01 UTC (Sun) by Golodh (guest, #54653) [Link]

I agree with most of the comments that explain why OpenOffice isn't a "hit" with developers.

- it's too large to understand and it doesn't seem to be sufficiently modular for volunteers to get hang of before they lose interest
- it's "boring" because it's mature and pretty much feature-complete
- it's too mature and to coherent; you have to break an awful lot of things just to change something small

This is indeed the sort of software that individual volunteers can't contribute a lot to. But then I don't miss them either.

I like Open Office. A lot. It just works and it helps me to get my writing and spreadsheets and presentations done with minimum fuss. It allows me to interact with MS-Office users. I use it instead of having a license for MS Office, and I think that 95% of Office users can do the same. Its nearest competitor, KOffice, is something I don't even need to hear about. Simply because I have Open Office. Perhps some day, when KOffice matches Open Office in features, I'll be inclined to compare the two. But not now.

As long as it's available for free I'll be happy to use it. It's an (extreme) example of an OS project where "free as in beer" is just more important than "free as in speech".

Redflag contributes to OOo

Posted Oct 15, 2008 12:14 UTC (Wed) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

It's the first time I've seen Redflag contribute anything. I think that's pretty cool.