Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

K-9

An article I just found re: OOo and stagnation.

http://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008.html

OPENSTEP · Posted: Sun Dec 28, 2008 1:59 pm Post subject:

Yeah I saw that hit /. earlier today or yesterday. It's actually a repost...Meeks had written that article back before OOoCon if I remember correctly. We already have a thread on it somewhere around here.

As I think I mentioned then, I think the biggest threat to OOo is the future of Sun itself. While I don't know the internal balance sheets, I suspect that OOo is not a revenue generating operation for Sun, much less StarOffice. At this point I think you'll begin to see shareholders question the open source strategy pursued by Sun. Sun is a server and big iron company; the compelling argument I heard for open source is that it will increase support revenues potentially but also lead to increased hardware sales being a single system vendor.

However, one of the big problems with this is that OOo is a desktop application. Sun does not sell consumer machines or even business PCs...I don't see how it translates into server sales at all. MySQL, Java, VirtualBox, all of those make sense. I have no idea how a respectable bizdev guy can view OOo as benefiting server sales.

Like all companies, in the next year Sun will need to cut their expenses and refocus on their core business. As capex dries up, server sales will drop as well. I doubt the Sun policy of cutting staff to break even on earnings will be able to keep up. So, if you need to cut, what gets cut? Things that aren't benefitting your core business.

But who says bizdev has to be something logical Smile

ed

K-9 · Posted: Sun Dec 28, 2008 2:23 pm Post subject:

yes - i agree. I am sorry - I was not aware of it being old material just saw it this AM when I got up posted as new info.

Smile

sardisson · Town Crier Joined: Feb 01, 2004 Posts: 4588

Would have been nice if mmeeks had a date on his post somewhere Wink

I think it would also have been interesting to see corresponding data for ooo-build, given that's where the Linux distros are concentrating their efforts (and also given the bureaucratic hurdles to getting features and fixes to actually land in the main OpenOffice.org itself), and that for Linux distros (at least those concerned with "Linux on the desktop" and not just servers), having a capable office suite *is* part of the core business.

Smokey

OPENSTEP · Posted: Sun Dec 28, 2008 9:58 pm Post subject:

As far as I know, SUSE may be the only desktop distro with a customized package. Red Flag does their custom Chinese Linux distro; I suspect RedOffice is included in their Linux distro, but I don't know for certain. Red Hat used to do their own for RHE (which Dan was working on), but I don't think the Fedora project has maintained a branched OOo. I believe most of the other Linux distros just package a prebuilt stock OOo binary into their package management systems but without any customizations.

I may be totally wrong, however, as I haven't looked at most of the desktop Linux distros in depth. Aside from Novell and Red Flag, I don't think any of the other distros or vendors are investing any significant resources into extending OOo.

ed

rays · Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2008 1:14 am Post subject:

jakeOSX · Ninja Joined: Aug 12, 2003 Posts: 1373

the interesting part about symphony is they are using OO.o 1.1, not the 2.0 branch. IIRC this is a license choice, not a technology one, but still...

K-9 · Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2008 8:19 am Post subject:

a couple of linux distros that I know fo and one that I use refuse to use the newer OOo 3 simply because of issues with the new version. Do not recall the issues. People complain that they have not integrated 3.0 whatever version extension but they still are using the older 2.x version with their distros. They say that the individual can download and install the newer versions but they are not responsible for any problems. (from what i have read on some the threads when OOo 3 first was released.)

jakeOSX · Ninja Joined: Aug 12, 2003 Posts: 1373

well, i would expect 3.0 to have issues since it was newer software. but 2.0 branch was nearly stable (iirc) when ibm made its announcement.

i haven't tried symphony yet, mainly because you have to fill out a form to get it. They do not need to know my email address to let me download a beta.

K-9 · Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2008 9:27 am Post subject:

give them a yahoo account mail address.

aussie149 · Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2009 7:31 pm Post subject: Symphony

I had a look at Lotus Symphony today. You could certainly put any email address and name in the sign-in sheet. There are some interesting features: it's almost like they have used iWork Pages as a guide in some respects [eg in the setup of the "Layout" and "Create" dropdown menus - a revamp of "format" and "insert" - and in the side menu], although the overall "look" of it seems very old-fashioned. It reminds me of an early iteration of an online office suite. Has a Gallery with a few useful additions, but nothing outstanding. No database, math or drawing program, but a web browser. Not sure why anyone would prefer it to NeoOffice or even OOo 3.0 for Mac
Peter

OPENSTEP · Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2009 2:49 pm Post subject:

I checked out Symphony when it was released, but it took forever to launch on an Intel mini.

I think Symphony is really an offshoot from IBM's Lotus Notes project which is why it has kind of a different interface. It didn't seem bad to me, not better, not worse, just different. It did seem very slow to me, however, and as an engineer I credit that to basing everything on top of Eclipse. Everything is packaged as jnilibs; while Neo uses java, we use native library loading and don't force ourselves through JNI wrappers except for code that requires it.

For UIs, I still am partial to MacBU's rethinking of the UI in Mac Office 2008...I think it's a very cool blend of the Mac menu-centric interface with a little bit of the ribbon thrown in. I think MacBU really got the "transition" interface right...I don't think I've read anywhere near the outcry on the new interface as with Office 2007 on Windows Smile

ed