Another source: the wiki.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/DomainDeveloper
Little count of developpers and qa-quys:
Sun Microsystems ... 103
Novell... ... ... ... ... ... 14
Beijing Red Flag ... ... .. 9
Intel Corporation ... ... 7
others (ind. / corp.)... 95
These are very rough numbers. (Includes Patrick, Ed , Dan, ...)
Looks like Neo has 1-5% ongoing developers?
Philip ( interesting ... he says with a ... grin )
Joined: Nov 21, 2005 Posts: 1285 Location: Witless Protection Program
Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2007 2:07 am Post subject:
Thanks Ed,
I know that these are just numbers. But it's interesting to see your statements that Sun provides most of the support/funding for OOo, backed up with "published" numbers.
Others may not be as aware that Sun provides the majority of code resources, or what would happen if Sun's management decided to stop funding this Open Source project - poof!
Philip ( fascinated by: "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" )
Others may not be as aware that Sun provides the majority of code resources, or what would happen if Sun's management decided to stop funding this Open Source project - poof!
This is especially true when you consider how much money both Sun and Novell spend on OOo. Using my "6 engineers costs US$1,000,000 per year" estimate (which is probably a bit low for arger companies), Sun is likely spending more than US$17 million each year and Novell is likely spending more than US$2 million each yearon OOo.
This is a lot of money and I doubt StarOffice sales or Novell's custom OOo sales are covering more than a small fraction of that cost.
Joined: Dec 08, 2005 Posts: 291 Location: Berlin, Germany
Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2007 4:33 pm Post subject:
ovvldc wrote:
Not everything is about money .
I also wondered sometimes about the fact that Sun is willing to pump so much money into OpenOffice, and I agree that it's not about profit. It's about control: Imagine, Sun would abandon OpenOffice - what would happen? I think, given the importance of OO as alternative on the desktop (especially Linux, and with ODF and all), very quickly other corporations or entities would come in and take over the ship (or come up with something completely new?). This way, Sun may hold control of a significant portion of the "Open Source Universe" and additionally shape their own StarOffice product.
In the end, the whole NeoOffice/OOo Mac conflict seems to me also more or less about control: Eric Bachard (and possibly others) wanted to take over the whole operation (under the official umbrella), something that - luckily - didn't happen.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2007 5:15 pm Post subject:
doctype wrote:
I also wondered sometimes about the fact that Sun is willing to pump so much money into OpenOffice, and I agree that it's not about profit. It's about control: Imagine, Sun would abandon OpenOffice - what would happen?
OOo will die.
Plain and simple.
A lot of the most succesful open source software is funded by corporations, and corporations exist for profit. If Sun stopped StarOffice/OOo development, that means there's a $17 million plus or more funding hole to fill. There is no profit, sexiness, nor need for an alternative to Microsoft Office for the vast majority of corporations.
Whatever benefits Sun gains from their continued work on OOo is apparently beneficial from their perspective (and thus, somehow, profitable). And yes, I hope a big part of it is the glowing beneficience of altruism
Without Sun OOo is dead. You will not find a corporate benefactor to pony up the kind of resources Sun does. Sun contributes near an order of magnitude beyond anyone else, and that equates to a lot of money.
Yes, OOo fills a need for free software. The real question is "who will pay for it"? I don't know the answer, but I suspect it's very few.
Whatever benefits Sun gains from their continued work on OOo is apparently beneficial from their perspective (and thus, somehow, profitable). And yes, I hope a big part of it is the glowing beneficience of altruism
Without Sun OOo is dead. You will not find a corporate benefactor to pony up the kind of resources Sun does. Sun contributes near an order of magnitude beyond anyone else, and that equates to a lot of money.
While it probably isn't the only reason, most of Sun's 30,000+ employees use Solaris machines as their primary desktop and they need StarOffice for many of their employees to do their work.
Prior to StarOffice in my early years working at Sun, Sun was paying huge amounts of money for similar but less functional products that would work on Solaris. Being that Sun was and still is the only Fortune 500 company running more than a few Solaris desktops, Sun was essentially paying third parties to custom develop and maintain office productivity software for their platform.
My guess is that Sun won't stop funding OOo until they 1) ditch Solaris within the company or 2) go out of business. In the event that one of those does happen in the future, who would be there to pick up the pieces? Novell and IBM seem to be the only likely candidates as they are really the only companies making any significant money on Linux desktops. Red Hat used to, but they have largely ditched the Linux desktop as unprofitable.
The simple fact is that OOo exists because Linux (and Solaris) vendors need an office suite that is compatible with MS Office. MS Office is the de facto standard and I doubt that will change. So without OOo, Linux desktop vendors have a very difficult time selling their product.
the estimate that NeoOffice required 36 "person years" to get to where it is now, and with their default average salary of $55,000/year, would cost $1,955,168 if you were to hire someone to write it from scratch ...
Joined: Nov 21, 2005 Posts: 1285 Location: Witless Protection Program
Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2007 2:04 pm Post subject:
Samwise, ... VERY Cool site.
I like the details of their reviews.
Next time someone asks for ... "just a little change" we can refer them to the Millions of dollars expended on the OOo base code and NeoOffice extensions.
Gasp, the percentage of Java!
Of course that is based on auto-magic analysis of millions of lines of code. Interesting estimate(s) tho!
Philip ( LMT(Neo)CR )
\. This looks like an excellent "reference" site for Code projects.
Within the code we actively maintain, that's a reasonable count but strikes me as an overestimate. Their numbers probably don't cross-correlate with our patched build system, but more and more in the last few yearswe've been veering back into the C++ realm.
They also may have scraped the files wrong cause the LGPL count is way too high. The only files LGPL licensed are the NeoLight sources (only a handful)...the root COPYING license is pure GPL. We may need to clean up comments (or they may need to clean up their own analysis algorithms).
Joined: Nov 21, 2005 Posts: 1285 Location: Witless Protection Program
Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2007 2:19 pm Post subject:
grin,
So that's who has been poking around the anoncvs. That is kinda scary!
It's "interesting" to see an outside analysis. Some things are usually mis-computed but it gives a SWAG estimate.
I'm sure some minor Neo things could be cleaned up, and their system better tuned. Looks pretty good for the time and effort commited to NeoOffice
I found that it's kinda funny that Neo Stats. INCLUDE all the OOo Stats, but are not included in the reports - or something like that. (OOo had 7% java, 44% HTML? ) I wonder how the can report these stats so differently?
When I was reviewing the OOo code commiters, "pluby" had something like a 93% comment rate.
Philip ( "Our" Developers can ... your developers! )
\. THANKS to Samwise for finding this. Something else to ... poke at!
I'm hooking up on this thread, and have a comment and a question.
I am starting to understand that what really pisses the OOo-crowd off, is that "NeoO doesn't contribute anything back to the OOo-project"? (And this is a quotation from a user forum...) And this is why some orthodox OOo-folks consider NeoO some sort of "free-rider".
But is this true? Didn't Patrick donate all code from NeoO ver. x.x back to OOo sometime ago? Can anyone help my owerworked brain on this?
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 9:52 am Post subject:
Yes, we contributed back all of the Mac-specific patches that were not VCL related from Neo 1.1 back to the OOo project. I don't think they ever did anything with them since we still do a lot of the same patches even in 2.1 for locked files and such.
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