The problem(s) with OpenOffice

Before you start flaming, please understand that both I and the author of the news article are open source PROponents. We like open source. I've made a career of it.

But that doesn't mean open source is somehow infallible. Sometimes the comments here read like a devout Catholic thinking I've started a smear campaign against the immaculate conception. Keep in mind that it's just software and that it can always get better. Things get better as we find their bugs and improve them.

So, with that caveat....

OpenOffice stinks. Though it has become much better since I started using it back in 2000, it's still nowhere near what it needs to be to effectively displace Microsoft Office. (I've questioned whether we should even care about displacing it, but that's a separate discussion, and one that largely makes this whole dumb ODF debate pointless.) Why?

A few reasons. As Andrew Brown in The Guardian notes:

The myth of open source rests on two improbable assumptions. The first is that a significant proportion of users can fix bugs. That is true at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the concept of open source was first formalised in the 1980s by Richard Stallman and others, and it is true in some of the geekier corners of the internet. But on programs intended for use by the non-programming public, it's a very different story.

This is important because of the second crucial false assumption: that even if not all users can fix a bug, they can help find them. They can't. Most users just think: "The computer isn't doing what I want."

I've talked about this before, too: open source doesn't effectively pull in the collective intelligence of the code Proletariat. You won't find my parents, or even me (allegedly tech savvy) contributing to open source projects. We're technically incapable of doing so. And yet, we are the primary users of things like OpenOffice. Where's our vote?

Even those who are capable of fixing bugs and adding features to OpenOffice don't necessarily do so, and many can't. Why? Either they don't have time or inclination (their "itch" is elsewhere), or they don't have the ability to do drive-by development on a gargantuan pile of code like OpenOffice. Says Brown:

But what about the innumerable volunteers who can download the code and fix what they like? They take one look at the effort involved and run. OpenOffice is an extremely complex mountain of source code. As far as I know, in the five years it has been available as open source, not one contribution to the program has come from amateurs. The outsiders who have provided input have been full-time professionals employed by Linux companies to help make the software credible.

There has been a lot of volunteer effort, but it has gone into support....[B]ut the overwhelming energy [around OpenOffice development] seems to go into filling the blogosphere with remarks about the merits of open source software and getting outraged about inconvenient facts.

What facts? Well...(again, Brown):

So why is OpenOffice so dire? The project claims more than 50m downloads of the software, so let's assume that 50m people have tried it at least once.

More than 50,000 bugs have been reported. And how many have been fixed by open source's uniquely efficient processes? According to the (public) bugs database, at last count, there were more than 6,000 unfixed bugs, and more than 5,000 feature requests. While the number of bugs discovered seems to rise with the number of users, the number of fixes doesn't, and the number of fixers certainly doesn't. Only about 500 people have signed the legalese that would enable them to submit code to the project; since you need to do this even to make changes to the website, that will translate to far fewer than 500 volunteers submitting real code. A reasonable guess would be 50, or even five.

Meanwhile, there are some simple, hugely irritating bugs that are four years old. Two obvious ones: notes (or comments, as Word users call them) don't have word wrap; and spaces typed at the end of a line won't show. It's not many eyes making bugs shallow; more like many eyes making bugs invisible.

Most software has similar irritations. But complex open source projects seem uniquely badly placed to fix them. They rely on a very small group of programmers relative to the user base, and who have no direct incentive to work on the bugs that are important to users.

I don't necessarily agree with Brown on this last point. His comments may be true of "pure" open source development communities, but they are not accurately reflective of commercial open source projects, which benefit from a "pure" community effect but also have a corporation behind the code to take care of the ugly little nits in the code that free-love developers won't.

So, is the answer to throw out OpenOffice? No, of course not. Rather, we need to acknowledge its defects and work to fix them. How? Well, I'd personally recommend that Sun or Novell take on the project as a serious commercial offering. Sun comes closest to this with StarOffice, but I think the company would feel more inclination to improve it if it derived unique benefits from doing so. Arguably, it does today, but I think we could amplify those.

Would this make it less of a "community" project? Not really. Sun already does the vast majority of OpenOffice development. Such a move would simply recognize this fact and leverage it for Sun's benefit...and ours.