Pinderkent

Thanks to this blog post by Peter Harkins, I was alerted to Michael Meeks' analysis of the recent progress of OpenOffice.org. Both articles bring up some interesting points. Meeks provides various measures of activity relating to the development of OpenOffice.org. While software metrics are often suspect, he uses practical measures such the number and affiliation of contributors, lines of committed code, and so forth. His conclusions suggest that OO.o is "stagnating".

Meeks appears to put a lot of blame on the processes the developers must cope with, as well as the involvement of Sun. Harkins further suggests that the nature of the project doesn't itself towards generating an active developer community.

They're both correct. Unlike many other open source projects, OO.o never really felt open to community involvement. It originated as a commercial development, it was open sourced by one of the largest software and hardware providers, and has been developed using resources and people from a variety of companies. It fell onto the open source community, rather than growing forth from it.

OO.o isn't the only such project to have been in this position. The Mozilla project is similar in many respects. Like OO.o, the initial software was a commercially-developed, closed source product that was eventually open sourced. Netscape and AOL were quite involved with its initial development. And for the first five years or so, we saw stagnation. There were usable releases put forth, but they weren't truly innovative or inspiring.

Things started to change once Phoenix, now known as Firefox, was released. We saw innovation. We saw a more useful piece of software emerging. And best of all, it was a community effort. As such, a healthy developer and user community formed. Since then, we have seen it become a very prominent and widely-used Web browser. The original Mozilla Suite has taken a back seat to Firefox and the Thunderbird email client.

Something similar might be what the OO.o community needs. Namely, an effort from the community itself that aims to tackle many of the problems of OO.o. In a sense, it'd be the OO.o community competing with itself. The best parts of OO.o would be used, while the software develops into a product that satisfies the needs of the users better than OO.o currently does. There would be less focus on competing with other commercial office suites, and instead a focus on providing, for instance, a word processor that best meets the needs of its developers and users.

OO.o might also want to take another page from Firefox, and become more of a host for plugins. It provides the basic functionality of a word process or a spreadsheet application, for instance, but it's the plugins that really make it suitable for a given user. So instead of getting an awkward, poor-performing and memory-intensive integrated jumble of functionality, 95% of which is unused by most users, they would instead get a leaner application where they use the vast majority of the functionality it offers, and use a few plugins here and there to really tailor it to their needs.

Are we likely to see this happen? It's somewhat doubtful. I'm not sure if the open source community really needs an office suite as badly as, for example, Firefox was needed. For instance, many developers I know will just use plaintext files, HTML or LaTeX when they need to create a document. But if the OO.o project were to stagnate further, perhaps that would actually help generate the grassroots initiative needed for OO.o to experience its own Firefox-style revitalization.