OpenOffice code is ugly
I’ve always been annoyed by RSS feeds that hide information “below the fold”, where you have to click on a link to read the whole thing. Sometimes, especially in Planet feeds, it can be downright deceiving.
Stuart Yeate’s latest post on why developers don’t love OpenOffice.org is a case in point. Thanks to a combination of a lead that cuts off halfway through his list and an unordered list, the most important reason that open source developers don’t embrace OpenOffice.org is invisible.
* OOo is not built using the open source development methodology. OOo is not planned, structured, implemented or run as a typical open source software development project, which makes it much harder for open source developers to to contribute on a casual basis
When I got into translation work, there were three main targets for me - OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and GNOME. I quickly got commit access to GNOME and have the odd spate of activity when I actually get stuff done. This is casual involvement at its finest.
Unfortunately, the entire process around OpenOffice is completely opaque in comparison. The agenda is (still) largely controlled by Sun managers rather than individual community members; the build process is complex, involved, and underdocumented; it has a needless dependency on the still-proprietary Java machine which is increasing rather than decreasing; it does not build on the common internationalisation framework used by nearly every other project; and so forth.
I’m a dabbler, but I have my hand in many places. I’m a (recently added) member of the OpenDocument standards committee, do GNOME translation, help maintain a kernel driver and an X.org driver, a community member of the Ubuntu Laptop Testing Team, contribute when I can to Redland, rolled my own linux distro once upon a time, and have several projects in the queue for public unveiling.
I did have an intention of contributing to OpenOffice once. After seeing the code, I’d much rather contribute to AbiWord (and in fact will when I’m no longer overcommitted on other projects). I know that Sun is still learning to play nice with the FOSS world, and I expect someday I will be a dabbler in that code base, too. But not now.