Open Office, and OSS fears

[nelson at bignachos.com (Brian Nelson)]

Steve <steve at cyberianhamster.com> writes:

> On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 20:27, Derek Martin wrote:
>> OO is an important software package to the Free software world; if Sun
>> abandons it, I believe it will be picked up. 
>
> Given its importance, the community should be involved now while
> OpenOffice is still in Sun's good graces. The transition to a more
> community oriented project would be a lot smoother. OpenOffice is too
> dependent on a Sun business decision, and Sun as a business is in murky
> territory.
>
> But the community isn't (after about 4 years?) Apparently, despite its
> importance as a desktop solution and widespread use, there aren't enough
> people who enjoy trying to wrap their minds around a bazillion lines of
> OpenOffice code. They see an already solid program, but the
> consideration of the resources required to support that codebase isn't
> there. There is no sense of urgency to become involved. Sun is taking
> care of it. I wonder if the community at large is even aware that Sun
> shoulders that much of a load and is having a lot of difficulty
> attracting OO community-driven developers that they don't have to pay? 
>
> One reason why high-profile projects like OpenOffice are troublesome
> from an open source perspective is that although the code is available,
> the community involvement is low. Just seems like a small army of paid
> Sun employees and a few saints. Some people talk about OpenOffice's
> success as an open source project in the same vein as say the kernel,
> but OpenOffice's programming resources are mostly supplied by Sun
> whereas the kernel is mostly done by a community. To me, they are very
> different beasts.
[...]

I, and likely many others, have very little motivation to contribute
free time to a project where several others are getting a full salary to
do the exact same thing.

I would guess this is also a problem for the Mozilla Project.

-- 
You win again, gravity!