Sun's OSS Chief on OpenOffice Extensibility and Cross-Pollination
by Sam Dean - Feb. 04, 2009Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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ZDNet Australia is out with an interesting interview with Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems. He sheds some light on the state of the OpenOffice 3 suite of productivity applications, and its ongoing impact on the free Lotus Symphony suite of applications from IBM. (A new Mac version of the Symphony suite is a free download here.) Among other things, Phipps reports a whopping 35 million downloads of OpenOffice 3 since October. I have to wonder whether the ultimate free producivity suite is a mashup, though.
According to Phipps:
"There have been 35 million downloads [of OpenOffice 3] since October. When you look at the historic graphs showing downloads that is significantly up even on a new release. Anyone who is assessing the success of OpenOffice.org 3 would be making a huge mistake if they fail to account for the plug-ins, where there have been more than 50 new plug-ins since October."
Phipps also confirms that developers from IBM contribute to the core code of OpenOffice as well as the core code of Lotus Symphony, which is not open source, but is free and has always been based on OpenOffice. When I read these comments, it struck me that many people looking for a competent suite of free and open source productivity applications may not realize that the best solution may be a mashup of disparate applications.
I happen to find the SHEET spreadsheet in Symphony, which has its roots in Lotus' heyday with the 1-2-3 spreadsheet, infinitely preferable to the CALC spreadsheet in OpenOffice. Likewise, I prefer AbiWord to any other open source word processor. For presentations, the IMPRESS presentation application in OpenOffice is more than good enough for my needs.
Phipps points to cross-pollination between OpenOffice, which is purely open source, and Symphony, which is freeware based on open source code. In addition to logical mixing and matching of applications between these suites that you can do, I find it great to have Go-oo on hand as well. Go-oo is a lighter, faster fork of OpenOffice with a number of Microsoft-compatible components not found in OpenOffice.
I have it on my radar to try out some of the newer plug-ins for OpenOffice, but the point of this post is that mixing and matching productivity applications and plug-ins has the potential to deliver a really optimized collection. Some of the same developers work on OpenOffice and Symphony, Go-oo improves on OpenOffice in several ways, and Phipps makes clear that plug-in development for OpenOffice is healthy. One download is not necessarily the path to the ideal suite, and I wonder how many of the 35 million OpenOffice downloaders since October are aware of alternatives for components in the suite.
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