By
Ryan PaulThe OpenOffice.org (OOo) project ranks high among the most popular open source software applications. The cross-platform productivity suite, which has been adopted by government agencies, companies, and individual users around the world, got a big boost this morning with the
official release of version 3.0. The new version includes a modest assortment of significant new features and brings improved support for document standards.
One of the most noteworthy additions in this release is native compatibility with the Mac OS X platform. Users no longer have to rely on the NeoOffice port or use X11 to run OOo on a Mac. This new feature could help expand the program's market share and attract new users and contributors. When we reviewed Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 earlier this year, many of our readers expressed serious frustration with Microsoft's decision to omit support for VBA. Some Mac users who require VBA support might benefit from switching to OOo, which offers passable VBA compatibility.
OOo supports several file formats, but uses OASIS's OpenDocument Format (ODF) by default. ODF is rapidly gaining widespread acceptance and is also supported by Google Docs, Zoho, IBM's Lotus Notes, and KDE's KOffice project. ODF is increasingly being adopted as the preferred format by government agencies in many different countries. This trend has placed pressure on Microsoft, which has agreed to include native ODF support in future versions of Office.
Improvements and new features
A major area of improvement in OOo 3.0 is support for emerging document standards. OOo 3.0 includes the first major implementation of ODF 1.2, an updated version of the format that is in the final stages of the standardization process and is expected to receive ISO approval this summer. The new version of the format brings a new formula language and a new metadata system based on W3C's Web Ontology Language and Resource Description Framework. OOo 3.0 also includes import filters for Microsoft's controversial Office Open XML format (OOXML), the XML-based document format that is used in Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X. Support for Microsoft's format will ensure that OOo users can still read documents produced by Microsoft Office users.
OOo 3.0 includes a variety of other compelling technical features, too. OOo Calc, the suite's spreadsheet program, has a new solver component, introduced a new collaborative editing feature, and also boosted the total number of columns it supports from 256 to 1,024. OOo Writer, the word processing program, added a new annotation feature and a new zoom slider.
The new version includes a few minor user interface enhancements, including a new, cleaner icon theme. The style reminds me a little bit of the Silk icon theme, but with much more vibrant coloring. Linux users will obviously prefer OOo's Tango theme, but the new default theme looks very good on Windows. OOo 3.0 also includes a new launcher that provides easy access to templates, existing documents, and all of the suite's programs. When OOo is installed on Windows, it creates a shortcut on the desktop that initiates the launcher. Users can still also launch the OOo programs individually from the Start Menu.
OOo contributor fears that development is stagnating
As the OOo project increases in relevance, some friction has emerged between the growing number of stakeholders with different agendas. Allegations continually emerge that Sun's management of the project is impeding acceptance of some third-party code contributions and is deterring additional corporate involvement. Novell's Michael Meeks, a very active OpenOffice.org developer and a frequent critic of Sun, expressed some new concerns last week in anticipation of the release.
Novell maintains an OOo patchset which includes a number of changes that developers haven't been able to push upstream to Sun's version for a variety of reasons. Many of these patches maintained by Novell provide important features that are valuable to Linux users, including support for embedded multimedia via GStreamer, faster startup time, improved Excel interoperability, support for 3D slide transitions in Impress, and support for Mono-based automation and scripting. Many mainstream desktop Linux distributions now package Novell's version instead of the one from Sun, because of these improvements.
Sun's process for vetting new features is often viewed as excessively bureaucratic by third-party contributors and some are also concerned about Sun's copyright assignment requirements. Novell's patchset ensures that the improvements made by users who are unwilling to accommodate Sun's procedural requirements will eventually reach users and don't just languish indefinitely in the bug report system. Sun has responded to concerns from the third-party developer community by improving the contributor agreement and making an effort to act on community feedback. Critics, however, argue that Sun needs to turn over control to an independent foundation so that contributors will not have to assign copyright directly to Sun.
In a blog entry published last week, Meeks published contributor statistics collected from the version control system. He says that the latest statistics demonstrate a universal decline in involvement in the OOo project, from both Sun and independent community members. He sees this as a sign that the project is no longer healthy, and he warns that the consequences could be dire if the problem isn't resolved.
"It is clear that the number of active contributors Sun brings to the project is continuing to shrink, which would be fine if this was being made up for by a matched increase in external contributors, sadly that seems not to be so," wrote Meeks. "Crude as they are—the statistics show a picture of slow disengagement by Sun, combined with a spectacular lack of growth in the developer community. In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition—we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org."
Meeks calls for Sun to distance itself from the project and establish a new governance model that is totally community-driven. "Kill the ossified, paralyzed and gerrymandered political system in OO.o. Instead put the developers (all of them), and those actively contributing into the driving seat," Meeks urges. "This in turn should help to kill the many horribly demotivating and dysfunctional process steps currently used to stop code from getting included, and should help to attract volunteers."
We attempted to contact Louis Suarez-Potts, Sun's community manager for OOo, to see if he could provide additional insight or a response to the latest allegations from Meeks, but we have not yet received a response.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is an impressive release that delivers some important new functionality, especially for Mac OS X users. The project continues to deliver a surprising amount of polish and functionality, but it still lags behind Microsoft's dominant office suite. If IBM, Sun, Novell, and other major stakeholders could work together more closely to accelerate development and lower the barriers to entry for community contributors, it would put OOo in a much stronger position to compete with Microsoft's office hegemony.
Most of the OpenOffice.org web site has been taken down due to excessive load, but download links are still accessible from the main page.
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