Erwin's StarOffice Tango

"Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org"
I won't provide numbers, but I can tell you that the following statement is for sure wrong or at least very misleading:

"Sun is still the largest contributor to the project with some 50 developers in Germany, followed by Novell with about 10 contributors, and only four active community developers."

Just count how many features have been developed by whom and you will find out yourself what the ratios are! I find it misleading to compare contributors with developers. The OpenOffice.org community has many contributors who could also be seen as developers. Many people are doing QA and localization work for example. Also there is no mentioning of the OpenOffice.org developers at Red Hat!?

Simon makes an interesting comment:

"Sun Microsystems' chief technology evangelist Simon Phipps acknowledged the challenges OpenOffice.org faces and put it down to its monolithic code base rather than Sun's contribution governance.

"For something that was originally written for Windows 3.1 and OS/2, the fact that it now runs on Linux and Solaris is a significant achievement," Phipps said.

Phipps said Sun welcomes contributions from both individuals and organizations that use the productivity suite, including big names Like IBM.

"Ask IBM why it uses OpenOffice but doesn't contribute to it," he said."

I also would love to see more features come from external developers, especially from those who sell OpenOffice.org as part of their products. It's also interesting to see who sponsored the last annual OpenOffice.org conference in Berlin.

The full article can be found here.
( Apr 19 2005, 07:56:49 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [5]

Kommentare:

Thanks for the info... didn't know that Novell and 4 others also did some work on OO.org.

Gesendet von Rayson am April 19, 2005 at 08:24 AM CEST #

there are quite a few. Whats disturbing is IBM paying lip service to open source and not contributing to Open Office at all. But you can't tell the slash penguins that.

Gesendet von 192.18.42.11 am April 19, 2005 at 10:35 AM CEST #

Actually IBM does cooperate to the OOo suite, they have develop great deal of documentation on this regard. Specially XML stuff.

Gesendet von Jza am April 19, 2005 at 03:20 PM CEST #

I'd appreciate if people here would make themselves known, especially if they accuse people or companies! Thanks, Erwin

Gesendet von Erwin Tenhumberg am April 19, 2005 at 04:46 PM CEST #

If Phipps really said "Ask IBM why it uses OpenOffice but doesn't contribute to it", I'm surprised. IBM use the OpenOffice code base in the file editors within their Workplace offering, and AFAIK have contributed fixes back into the main OpenOffice codestream.

Gesendet von Ben Poole am April 19, 2005 at 06:14 PM CEST #