Is the OpenOffice.org Project in Good Health?

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

That's a question that's being brought up in a semi-recent blog post by OOo developer Michael Meeks, and it's a good one. While companies like Microsoft can afford a large team of developers to dedicate themselves to working on their product, OpenOffice depends mostly on volunteer work, and as it seems lately, the state of that support seems to be in question.

Michael takes a look at things from a few different perspectives. He aggregated stats from the commit logs to see who were contributing code to the project, who wasn't, and who seems to be in some sort of hiatus. The findings are pretty interesting, with the vast majority of code being contributed from Sun themselves. To make things even worse, the number of external developers has decreased substantially over the past few years.

I've complained about OpenOffice in the past, specifically with regards to its design, but I'm having an easier time seeing exactly why that's the case. If there's a lack of developers, then the entire project is going to slow to a crawl. This is a bad thing, though, because it's nice to have an alternative, especially a free one, to paid office applications, such as Microsoft Office. I'm no developer, and I have no recommendations for the project, but hopefully things can improve sooner than later. This is one project that's far too valuable to lose.

Differences: most obviously, magnitude and trend: O peaked at around 70 active developers in late 2004 and is trending downwards, the Linux kernel is nearer 300 active developers and trending upwards. Time range - this is drastically reduced for the Linux kernel - down to the sheer volume of changes: eighteen months of Linux' changes bust calc's row limit, where O hit only 15k rows thus far.

Source: Michael Meeks Blog
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[Kougar]

Very insightful to know, thanks for posting. I'm actually happy now with Office 2007, but it would be nice if OpenOffice was flourishing as well.

Although to counterpoint, looking at the data no trends have really changed since 2000. The only thing I can notice is the launch of Office 2007 siphoned away some devs... but that last most dip in numbers is probably to be expected with the recent turn of economical events. The time period is to short to read into the most recent data to far, except that Sun is cutting back on expenditures this year...

 

[Greg King]

I like the Open Office suite but I don't use it consistently enough to gripe about any one facet of it. I have it installed and I keep the latest installer around just in case someone needs it and occasionally, I will "force" myself to use it. I use the work force lightly because for a free app, it's absolutely solid. Given the amount that Microsoft is asking for their Office software, the Open Office suite will always have value.

With all that said, of course they have a hard time when it's strictly volunteers that do a large chunk of the work. Building off of that thought, its a cyclical process. They will have up times and down times. Eventually the coders will come back and work on this... it's how the open source community operates.