Le mardi 19 avril 2005 Ã 14:11 +0000, Andrew Brown a Ãcrit :
Erwin Tenhumberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
Some people might interpret the article in a way that the ration
between Sun and non-Sun developers is something like 50:14. If that
really was the case wouldn't that mean that a little more than 20% of
the features (= functionality) in OpenOffice.org 2.0 would have been
developed by non-Sun developers? Is that the case?
I'd have thought it was a gross over-estimate, frankly. I can't think of
a single addition to the functionality of OOo 2.0 that has come from
outside Sun.
Right, and Sun wrote HSQLDB too?
No it didn't. But it took care of the integration. And HSQLDB was not offered up to us as a contribution, but we pulled it in.
And note that Erwin talks about 20%. IMHO that is still on the high side, but appreciates that there are contributed features. There is the WordPerfect import filter, some native plugin and system integration (e.g. KDE) stuff. There is also some stuff where I am not sure it has reached production quality yet, like the postgresql driver or the helix integration. And last but not least there is a number of smaller
The atmosphere on ooo lists is so Sun-centric I can understand non-Sun contributors prefer to work through separate projects like Ximian oo.o.
Huh? It is a fact that the majority of developer are currently Sun employees. Then it should be no surprise that most of the contributions on the development lists are from Sun people. In fact, considering the POV of employed (formerly closed-source) developers, it is a significant step forward for the community that Sun developers do significant parts of their development work on public mailing lists instead of face-to-face meetings. That is the reason why you see Sun people discussing among themselves on the public lists, not because they strive to dominate some imaginary, preexisting community.
If you want to get involved, get into the discussion.
Just because you won't hear them here, and a lot of their stuff does not seem to end up in core oo.o (though it's used by all linux distributions) does not mean they do nothing.
If people don't show up on our lists, how are we expected to work with them. If people really find something they can't live with they can use use our processes to get obstacles removed (like the Community Council or the Engineering steering comittee). But of course, as in any OSS project, if you can't live with project policies, you have to bite the bullet and leave or fork.
To be fair, I do believe a lot of Linux organisations decided long ago it was more effective to focus developer efforts on projects where the patch acceptance ratio was higher (ie GNOME). So contributions are minimalistic now but don't blame people when there are so many worthwhile projects that make it easier to contribute.
I think every OSS project has a set of rules to go by. If you don't like those of OOo you can either work with and convince people to change the rules or leave. Just complaining that people aren't waiting to put your pet fix into a stable release with many users just because it is there won't do.
Example of dropped work : back in oo.o 1.x time ximian oo.o started replacing the ugly openoffice artwork with gnomish modern stuff. Instead of building on that effort Sun chose to do its own thing in OpenOffice.org 2 (and users still complain today the result is unprofessional). Now I doubt you'll find anyone ready to spend time on prettifying oo.o buttons - Sun has make it clear any changes here won't be accepted.
Of course UI can always be a matter of dispute. And changing this between dotdot releases on the 1.1.x branch was probably considered inappropriate. I have never seen how the Ximian Artwork looks on Windows - does integrate as well as with Gnome? IIRC there are also aspects that make the new OOo icon set technically superior to the Ximian one for 2.0. I have never seen those refuted. Instead the image handling was changed so that you can easily create a different icon set and replace it in your copy of OOo.
Ciao, Joerg
Note that I am speaking for myself, not for Sun officially, nor do I pretend that many (or any) other Sun developers share these views.
-- Joerg Barfurth Sun Microsystems - Desktop - Hamburg >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> using std::disclaimer <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Software Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] OpenOffice.org Configuration http://util.openoffice.org
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