Yet another OOo rant thread

[OPENSTEP]

Not only are we no longer listed but the fact there are even other alternatives is not even linked to any longer through the Mac OS X OOo download pages.

OpenOffice.org wants you to believe that they are the only solution. Our existance threatens their fragile egos.

NeoOffice is still persona non grata and will be forever. Unless we capitulate and do things their way and play by their rules and proclaim their leaders have saved the world from a pandemic we can't join them. And we'll continue to work separatly, NeoOffice will continue to be a better product, and that's fine by me.

Politics has no place in engineering. That said, I have no desire to participate as a member of any open source project that in the past has proactively employed slander and censorship against other volunteer organizations as a means of self-marketing. If you're an engineer, be a real engineer, express your arguments in *code*, not hot air. Argue then why it's better and why you are justified in withholding information from unwary users who, upon seeing your paltry nothing solution, wind up ignoring your own "noble" cause and go out and buy Office anyway even though there is another way.

Regardless of what our collective upbringing may have indicated, yes, it's totally possible for multiple people to wield the power of greyskull and yes that's cool.

We cannot change the effects of whatever "righteous" camp brainwashes the users of the other first. Propoganda will always result in those who believe the only true way comes from software named OpenOffice.org. The real deciding factor is who can devise the more effective propoganda.

I just morally can't employ censorship and personal slander as marketing tactics, so OpenOffice.org has already won.

Go revel in your ability to hurt potential open source software users. Hats off to you.

In the meantime I'll just sit here and happily gloat that our OS X download numbers are of quantities other open source projects wish they could see in a wet dream.

ed

[OPENSTEP]

This was a reply I had done in this thread:

http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=2602

but felt it was better moved to ranting since I needed to blow off some steam

ed

[Paleobiology]

I'm not surprised by that; I used to work in a job where the #1 priority was to "stay on message," even if that message was too monolithic to take into account the heterogenous needs of out clients. Standards are good, but only for the sake of compatibility; once you can no longer select from a diverse pool of options (Oliver Wendell Holmes called it "the marketplace of ideas") everyone suffers. I like to think opposing homogeneity was a big reason many of us support OOo. Hopefully this isn't going to be a case of "meet the old boss, same as the new boss."

[OPENSTEP]

I think there is a large portion of OOo support that does come from that same mentality, but sometimes it's message gets twisted. For example, take all the OOo fanboys with the Mass. OpenDocument brouhaha. The state of Mass. decided to mandate use of OpenDocument as its format. OOo fanboys cheered. Then, however, when a competing open source project that made OpenDocument filters for MS Office became the state's path of choice, they cried foul. All of that push and celebration of "open documents" really was just a thin veneer over the perceived reality that the open document decision mandated they use OpenOffice.org.

This stilll continues with certain members of OOo bashing other OpenDocument applications, such as ourselves, and also the MS Office filter projects. Not to mention the new Novell bashing by some others for supporting Microsoft's formats. I think the anti-Microsoft venom that caused some people to join and support OpenOffice.org has gone beyond attacking just Microsoft and has become a tendency to attack anyone who isn't OpenOffice.org. They have no qualms about attacking any project or persons that threaten their ability to market themselves as the only open source alternative office suite. The fact that some of these individuals are contractors that have monetized interests in making OpenOffice.org the standard (not OpenDocument!) just further muddles the situation. The existance of other products threatens their business opportunities, renewal of their contracts with corporate community members, their jobs, or their chances at gaining fame.

It's not that everyone who works on OOo falls into this category at all, and I believe that the majority of people are sincere. Unfortunately, not all of them are and that tends to wreck it for people who are volunteering just because they want to help an ideal, not a product.

ed

[LemonAid]

[OPENSTEP]

[MacRat]

Ah!

Now we know the REAL reason that Ed puts all this work in!

[OPENSTEP]

It sucks to be using software that you know you could fix the stupid NULL dereference if you just had the source code

ed