Blog: Pete Loshin: How Great is Open Source Software?

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How Great is Open Source Software?

Author and open source contributor Andrew Brown recently wrote about the dark down side of open source software in the Guardian,
If this suite's a success, why is it so buggy?.

Unlike the usual rah rah cheerleading about open source software that comes from dilletantes like myself, or the pooh poohing of open source software that comes from Microsoft-owned industry hacks, Brown knows OpenOffice both as a sophisticated user who writes best-selling books with it, and as an open source contributor who has kicked in his own macros.

Brown makes some excellent points:

OpenOffice is buggy and slow, and for many applications just not nearly as good as Microsoft Office.
The vast majority of users haven't got the skills to find bugs in source code, and of those capable of reading source only a fraction are equipped to fix bugs in even a simple computer program.
The vast majority of users who run into bugs in OpenOffice aren't even capable of reporting those bugs.
OpenOffice isn't just any computer program, it's "an extremely complex mountain of source code", with over 50,000 reported bugs, of which about 6,000 are still unfixed.
Brown thinks there may be as few as 50 or even 5 people who actually contribute code to the project; most of the work on the project is done through corporations like Sun (which originally created the suite), IBM and Google, who (Brown suggests) see open source software as a good way to "gang up" on Microsoft.
As far as Brown knows, no "amateur" - someone from outside the professional OpenOffice community - has contributed.
So even users who might try their hand at fixing (or even just reporting) a bug in a simpler program are likely to run screaming from OpenOffice.

Brown points out just how bad OpenOffice really is, and how the only way it will ever really succeed is if for-profit corporations (like Sun, which created OpenOffice in the first place) invest in fixing it. But he also reminds us that it's still pretty early for OpenOffice - and that he still prefers OpenOffice for projects like 60,000 word books.

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