Today is a different day. It's the day that OpenOffice.org leaves its youth, and becomes a mature office suite fit to challenge the market leader, Microsoft Office, with today's release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 stable version. Get ready for some big changes in the way that the public thinks about the desktop.
In celebration of this day, Mad Penguin™ is running the third of three interviews with some of the people who have been hunkered down in endless meetings or hunched over their keyboards to bring us such a splendid, robust, virus-free code base. Today's interview is with OOo community manager, Louis Suarez-Potts. His interview is lengthy, but rich in history and deserving of its length, especially on this momentous occasion. OOo is a massive project, and so it is fitting to have an in-depth interview with one of OpenOffice.org's main project leads to look at where OOo has come from, how it got here, and where it is going.
No open source project is perfect, and OpenOffice.org certainly has flaws. Some people complain that it is too bulky and slow to load, especially when compared with Koffice or GNOME Office or AbiWord or text editors such as Emacs. Some people don't like the fact that there is a greater emphasis on Java in OOo 2.0. But diversity is the strength of free open source software, and the very existence of those other office productivity software packages is what makes OOo 2.0 stronger. Where OOo 2.0 is weak, those other excellent projects pick up the slack. And with KOffice and AbiWord moving to the OpenDocument format (ODF), the synergy between these various office productivity packages will become more significant.
Louis covers many topics in this article, but really only talks about one theme: the rewarding and sometimes tempestuous collaboration that we call free open source community. He discusses the unanticipated, wild success that OpenOffice.org became, and he alludes to some of the disappointments and frustrations that are inevitably part of working with human beings. He discusses the tensions that are inherent in strong-willed individuals who believe that they are working together while often actually going their own way; the logistic and cultural problems inherent in the OpenOffice.org community's attempts to merely coordinate its own massive, multi-cultural, multi-linguistic bulk; and how OOo has addressed those issues in the past.
Ultimately, Louis returns to the theme that many GNUsters and Penguinistas love most about free open source software: it's limitless possibilities. It is now feasible for major sectors of earth's population to share a commercially and culturally significant resource such as a powerful office productivity suite in the form of OpenOffice.org. This possibility leads us to wonder what else we can successfully share. Jack Messman, the CEO of Novell, has said that the water line of open source is always rising. Are we approaching an era of abundance, rather than scarcity, at least in the area of software? Moore's law is slowing, but processing power continues to drop in cost. What could human beings accomplish in a world without a scarcity of computing power? Certainly, we are not yet close to limitless computing power, and free open source software will not, in itself, feed the hungry, build schools, lay highways, or provide clean drinking water, but it will help us accomplish all those things more efficiently, across what we now think of as barriers, borders, or horizons. That's why Louis calls OpenOffice.org a “horizonless” office productivity suite.
Of all the millions of people whose lives have been affected by OOo, there are only a few handful who have the kind of depth of knowledge of this massive project that Louis has, so Mad Penguin™ is very pleased to celebrate OpenOffice.org's birthday with his interview. We would also like to extend our thanks to the community members across the globe, including the folks at Sun, who have brought us to this day.
The first two articles in this series were Slashdotted here and here.
