The State of OpenOffice
Jono Bacon has a nice essay on the current state of OpenOffice. He argues—rightly in my view—that:
I would go so far as to say that a feature complete, high performing and integrated OpenOffice.org is key to the success of the Linux desktop. In many ways, the efforts with GNOME and KDE pale in importance to the work on OpenOffice.org. People will not move to the Linux desktop if there are not the applications, and OpenOffice.org is essential.
This point is clear in higher ed. Despite being a co-project lead for an offical OOo project, I still cannot recommend the suite to my colleagues, which is pretty much the point at which both OOo and Linux might become a real option for them. Without good bibliographic support, OOo simply has no chance in higher ed.
Jono makes another point that has frustrated me over the past year or two:
With 1 RedHat, 80 Sun, and 8 Novell hackers, the number of paid developers greatly outweighs the less than 10 active external coders involved in the project. If you then factor in the need for artists, quality assurance, documentation, translations, system administration and more, the project needs a huge development backbone to keep going.
One of the problem that faces OpenOffice.org is a lack of hands on deck.
He then goes on to offer some suggestions to spur greater contribution, among them switching to a much shorter—six month—release cycle. That might help, as will further modularizing the HUGE OOo codebase. Indeed, one reason our project is stalled is because we need some low-level changes to make what we want to do feasible. Those changes can’t happen—or even be planned—until 2.0 is out the door.
But beyond that, speaking for the OOoBib project, we really need more institutional support.
