Sun has maintained control over the source and has controls in place to
control what is added. The lack of contributions from others is likely
related more to the difficulty in building OOo than in having the code
contributed.
Much of the code by Meeks has been integrated into OOo, but it was not
done on his schedule.
As for the numerous old bugs, I have found that without exception, if I
found the location and fix for a bug, that the bug was fixed rapidly. I
have also seen this for the few people that created fixes that did not
use the long controlled difficult process by Sun. For the Meeks code,
this was far more significant than a normal fix.
Based on the difficulty of entry, the OOo team has created facilities
for writing extensions. Major functionality is available using
extensions; for example, dictionaries and grammar checkers.
Why is adoption slower than say for Firefox? Well, I can install and run
Firefox and not worry about sharing documents with coworkers or macro
compatibility. I have a choice. For Word, when it starts in schools and
business, and then you require the compatibility, close is not always
good enough. For example, I have a major document that a client is not
able to edit in OOo because they are in a locked down secured
environment where they are not allowed to install software. They do have
MS Office installed. Well, my OOo document uses page styles to set
different page numbering capabilities and other interesting artifacts.
Word does not support page styles and it is difficult to reproduce the
same in Word. Certainly export does not work properly. There are other
issues as well with the export feature (my frames do not export properly
for Word).
Well, after many years of happily accepting a PDF document, they want a
Word document so that they can edit the document. OK, I will do a one
time conversion and then hand it over. The trick is that I need to find
and decide upon the items that will not transfer between the two. If I
must hand over a Word document with these features that do not export,
well, I must use Word from the start. Sure, I am using mostly advanced
features that the average user has no idea how to use or create. Some of
what I do that is advanced, I will allow to simply go away because I
know for certain that the client does not understand them or have the
ability to continue them in Word. That said, it is one reason why the MS
Products continue with such wide spread use after all this time.
--
Andrew Pitonyak
My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
My Book: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/oome.htm
Info: http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php
See Also: http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/index.html
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