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

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 10, 2008 15:49 UTC (Fri) by oska (guest, #25556)
Parent article: Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

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.

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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.