You’ve might have noticed, that OOo was set under Oracles supervision due to the purchase of Sun. OpenOffice.org was meant as an “real” alternative to Microsoft Office – productline.
In fact, it never established the way it should have been. The last stable version (3.3) was released in January 2011. The company I am working for uses OOo as an alternative to MSO for some kind of documents.
All documents which are passed to external companies, like letters are written in MS Word. OOo is used for internal (IT) management documents, which are needed to fulfil the documentation requested by the ISO 9000 standard. Documentation for products like the technical documentation, or “manuals” are written in OOo too.
We’ve spend round about 800 hours (100 working days) to “migrate” some VBA written macros to StarBasic, the internal macro language used by OOo.
In February this year (2011) on of our developers dealing with OOo discovered a nasty bug in OOo. The bug report was closed by a “supporter” referring to the forums and the documentation. Just around this time I meet the German community manager at the OpenRheinRuhr. She helped us to report this bug. Yes, you’ve read right, we -as a company- needed help by a community manager to file a bug!
The issue was related to the handling of external functions in MS Windows. Dealing with the Registry in Windows works fine with other programs that make use of the Windows API. Using the (registry-) API in OOo didn’t work at all in OOo 3.3. Our developer had trouble passing strings to an external function (in this case a dll, handling the Windows registry). Reading and writing from and to the dll returned a lot of memory trash. He lead this back to a missing \0 termination of the string passed to or read from the external function.
He gave examples and proves and the issue was ignored, OOo 3.3 was released to the public. A disaster in my / our eyes.
Today the topic came back to us and we saw that OOo has a nearly dead upstream as it is called in the Linux community, meaning that there are no further development progress. OOo 3.3 is still the latest stable.
They must be kidding me! Ok, OOo was passed to the Apache Foundation, trying to establish a new community and dealing with the fact that more and more devs moving to LibreOffice. But this can’t be the end of OOo.
Quo vadis OOo … this is the question, I’m asking myself today. My company put itself in this dependency, but OOo made a lot of “noise” those days trying to pull companies to the OOo project. And some employees were weak enough to succumb the promises OOo made those days.
I’m a fan of open source projects, don’t get me wrong, but I believe that commercial used software should be tested well and hard. Bugs like the one “we” discovered can’t be closed with a reference to the documentation or a forum.
Commercial software isn’t good at all, but the companies developing and selling software need a good reputation, otherwise the software is not purchased by anyone.
OOo was planned as a MSO clone and the target market where home users. I guess 95% never ever opened the star basic editor and the chance that they discovered the bug we did is near zero. MSO is used by companies, ministries, governments etc. The chance that bugs are discovered is very high due to the usage of techniques like VBA.
Soo, let me come to an end:
OOo is dead in my eyes. It never established itself as an real alternative to MSO in the “professional” environment (“professional” is meant as the opposite of home users). No component shipped with OOo is that powerful as the corresponding program shipped with MSO. Each version of MSO comes with new features, which are more or less useful.
The company I’m working for is kind of screwed right now. I guess we are not alone in this position. We cannot move to other software. A developer of LibreOffice said that more than a million code lines differ from OOo making it nearly impossible to transfer code from one platform to another. I guess this is true for the star basic code. OpenDocument files can be opened for sure, but the time we spend in the macro developing is lost.
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