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

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 10, 2008 19:12 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
In reply to: Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org by forthy
Parent article: Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

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?

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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?