"Sun dropping out of OpenOffice.org development wouldn't be an entirely negative thing"

von Andreas Proschofsky  |  27. Juli 2008, 13:20
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    Michaels Meeks, OpenOffice.org hacker

Novell-developer Michael Meeks finds strong words for Sun's management of the free office suite in an interview - Pushes for own OOo flavor and talks about KDE/GNOME-unification

derStandard.at: Coming back to the question of copyright assignment: Isn't Novell doing the same with some of its own projects like Mono?

Meeks: That's a really good question. If you look at Mono, it's true that Novell has a stated company policy of requiring copyright assignment for the core - the JIT - which is some tiny proportion of the code, less than 15 percent. So Mono is a huge thing, there are the class libraries, there is all this infrastructure, all these pieces are usable in other places. It's the core that is kept LPGL and it's done so for commercial reasons and we are very upfront about that. So if you want to contribute to Mono, you can contribute in 80+ percent of the project without assigning rights to anyone. We'd love that to be the case with OpenOffice.org, honestly.

Sun is actually trying to push the problem off to plug-ins, by not requiring copyright assignment there. So the software ships pretty broken and in order to actually open your document you have to be online and download this thing from the public extension repository. And the OpenOffice.org user experience is already bad enough without anyone saying "your are going to have to install this, go to this webpage, look at our advert and then download it".

derStandard.at: Which parts are you referring to?

Meeks: Interestingly there are several pieces which are deliberately not installed by default to drive traffic to the plug-ins-site. There is this thing called "report builder", which is really a key part of the database thing. So as you get where it should be it says "There is something which isn't here, why don't you get it from the plug-in repository" and that's just an appalling user experience, there is no need for that, it doesn't offer you any efficiency wins.

derStandard.at: Being fed up with the current situation with Sun, you seem to be pushing harder for your own OpenOffice.org version with Go-oo.

Meeks: That's right. I think the reason is just frustration, we want to get a good user experience out there, we want to get our code out, we want it to be included - and if Sun won't include we have to do it ourselves. So we are now providing our own releases for Windows and also generic builds for Linux and encouraging people to use it. We'd love to have a unified release, but at the moment this is just not possible with Sun.

So the systray quickstarter is a good example for that: We improved the systray drastically, we tested it on Linux and Windows and then sent our patch upstream, but it broke something on Windows. So Sun "fixed" it upstream but of course broke the GTK+build again which they clearly didn't test themselves. So now it's in the code, but it is not activated, it's conditionally compiled out. Which is a shame as it's a huge win for startup-performance.

There also is the gstreamer audio/video-support which is not yet upstream, lots of that nasty Microsoft Works file format support, Mono-integration, better Chinese font rendering and so on. You can go to go-oo.org/discover and check the differences out for yourself.

derStandard.at: At the moment the Go-oo releases still trail the ones from OpenOffice.org quite a bit, are you going to improve on that?

Meeks: Yes. We've substantially improved on that recently actually. We are trying to get out concurrently with Sun. Clearly people don't want to be waiting around for bug fixes.

derStandard.at: Lot's of the work you have been doing in the past was focused around performance improvements and reducing the memory footprint. Is this an area where you are still able to make further substantial improvements?

Meeks: Yes, definitely. We have done a lot of work in partnership with AMD actually, because they wanted to get this done for ultra-mobile devices. This helped a lot in getting OpenOffice.org work well with Linux - and the other platforms as well. So we got startup down - on a reasonably fast CPU - to less than a handful of seconds. But cold start is still a problem, we load too much code that we don't really need, which is a bit silly. So the code needs restructuring to improve. And we need to do less I/O, so I'm trying to write some tools to see what I/O we are doing and where it's coming from.

But actually I'm already pretty impressed by the performance, if you for instance look at The GIMP, we now start faster than they do. We're approaching Firefox for warm start, so hopefully the cold start issues can be fixed and we'll be really good.

derStandard.at: Your official position at Novell now is "Desktop Architect", so what's part of this job?

Meeks: [laughs] Writing reports and talking to people. Trying to encourage people to work together more. There are some interesting things we are trying to do to get KDE and GNOME to share more work. And I've been pretty impressed by the KDE-people at SUSE how they embraced that. Moving the desktops together and sharing more code is really key. I mean the interest for us is to reduce maintenance costs, it's said that some 85 percent of the cost of writing software is maintenance. Also there a very sharp people on both sides of this divide, it's good to encourage GNOME and KDE people to work together, you know where there aren't bigger philosophical differences. Clearly we don't want to stop KDE being KDE or GNOME being GNOME, but competing on certain things doesn't make sense.

derStandard.at: So that's not about unifying both desktops?

Meeks: No. We don't want to have uniformity, we don't want a single desktop, clearly having both is great. But encouraging them to work together more closely is useful. And we see really encouraging signs, there's already lots of code that is shared across the desktops now. Having d-bus is a great example, not just because it is shared at all, but also because it is an enabling technology, because you can start to mix and match GNOME and KDE technologies.

Together we have much more power to encourage other people to get involved and reduce fragmentation across Mozilla and OpenOffice.org and all those things if we come along with really good shared infrastructure that's cross-platform. So it's the logical thing to do but the problem is breaking down the divide, some of the totems, the language barriers - all that things.

(Andreas Proschofsky, derStandard.at, 27.07.2008)

 

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Go-oo

OpenOffice.org

Novell

GNOME Users and Developers Conference (GUADEC)

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