The Forking OpenOffice Community Bodes Well For Users
by Sam Dean - Nov. 05, 2010Comments (5)- Related Blog Posts
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As PCMag.com notes, the productivity suite application arena, which it dubs "Office clones"Â is getting more complicated by the minute. The other day, Susan noted that the latest version of the OpenOffice suite, version 3.3, is upon us but she wondered if it might be the last. After all, OpenOffice.org developers are handing in their resignations (just look at some of them here), and many people are unhappy that Oracle now functions as steward of the project. We noted the discord back in August, and expressed concerns about Oracle's intentions all the way back in April. But is PCMag correct that the current situation is just a complicated mess? Perhaps there is a silver lining of the type that one only sees in the world of open source.
PCMag's John Dvorak notes that many OpenOffice developers are jumping ship to work on the LibreOffice fork, but he also notes that OpenOffice had shortcomings that could be addressed with developers who have a fresh perspective on a fresh project:
"Until now, OpenOffice had a pretty decent clone of Microsoft Word, but the rest of the system was weak. The spreadsheet, for example, can only suck up 64K rows of columns. I've already blown past that with one of my spreadsheets and had to resort to using Excel whose limit is a million or more. This problem needs to be fixed by the LibreOffice people immediately."
Exactly. That's the promising thing about the forking and ever more complicated world of productivity app suites. We're guaranteed to see more choice, and improvements to previous shortcomings, as competition among suites gets more competitive.Â
The real key here is that Microsoft has had very little competition to Microsoft Office over the years. It has taken notice of OpenOffice before, but not really as serious competition. The distribution of OpenOffice developers across new, related projects can only be a good thing. We've written before about Go-oo, another fork of OpenOffice that improves on the suite in some ways. Look for more serious competiton to Microsoft's suite now that the productivity app suite scene is getting so "complicated." And, where there is competition, one usually sees improved products.
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