On 10/31/05, Doug Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Fred A. Miller wrote: > > http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9593_22-5920762.html?tag=nl.e589 > > > > "We want to hire a couple of folks to help make OpenOffice better," > said Chris DiBona, manager for open-source programs at the search company. > > Two whole people!?! That's real commitment. > > Anyone who believes this is an altruistic move hasn't been paying > attention to the search engine wars. Google isn't interested in helping > OpenOffice.org, they are interested only in hurting you-know-who.
Hello Doug, I see what you're saying, but I respectfully disagree. "Two whole people" - at 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year - that's 4000 man hours of code per year. If they only hired the people for six months, that's still 2000 hours of code OpenOffice.org would not have had otherwise. Even if they only works half-time for those 6 months - that's 1000 hours of code. To me, that's a good thing. Other than Sun Microsystems, do you know of any other corporation that has hired people solely for the purpose of improving OpenOffice.org? I don't. There are other company's contributing, to be sure, but I don't know of any who employ OOo-only programs - again, outside of Sun. Let's say these "couple of folks" make minimum wage, and work half time for 6 months. That's over $5350 invested in OpenOffice.org. Most programmers make more than minimum wage, so you're looking at thousands of dollars being invested in OOo. This is a good thing. Of course Google wants to "hurt" Microsoft. But so does OpenOffice.org. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Do there motives conflict with ours? And even if there motives are some-how "impure" - the end result will be good for OOo. I don't see how this can be anything but good news for OOo. Google has writen in house most of the code they use. Google is widely regarded as being successful at what they do. The code they submit has a high chance of being very good. The only way I can see this move by Google as a negative is if they submit bad code, which would quickly get rejected by the community. And, again, I believe there is a slim chance of that happening. Even if this is only a spit in the eye to MS, and a "wooing" gesture to the FLOSS community, I think that ultimately, OOo will benefit. -Chad Smith
