OpenOffice politics

As I said, I'm now using StarOffice but am eagerly waiting for somethingbetter to come along, and I know it will. But not everyone seesStarOffice's opening as such a big deal. Sun's move into the open sourcearena is already starting to cause bad feelings as some open sourcebandwagon jumpers exercise their legs.

How can I put this lightly? The GNOME Foundation, clearly salivating overOpenOffice and Sun's embracing ofits desktop, appears to be abandoningsome of GNOME's longtime friends. In its description of the GNOMEFoundation, Sun says the group has already decided that it is "adopting OpenOffice [...] as the core of the office productivity softwarefor GNOME Office."

Hello? Has the Foundation forgotten that GNOME Office already had somepretty darn good core components? Let's have a look a second quote fromanother corner of this world: "Our goal is to become the World's Word Processor."

That piece of modesty comes not from anyone involved in OpenOffice, butrather from Martin Sevior, one of the core developers of the open-sourceAbiWord project.AbiWord was the wordprocessor component of GNOME Office... until Sun showed up.

Feature for feature
Sevior says AbiWord, still in beta itself, is on track to be every bitas good a word processor as the ones in StarOffice, Microsoft Office, or anyother suite. "We already do some things much better than OpenOffice,"he said, indicating features such as "modeless dialogs" that don'tfreeze the window while you select certain options.

Sevior also notes that AbiWord is more portable -- and more ported.OpenOffice is currently only available on Windows NT, Linux and Solaris --AbiWord is available on all those, as well as other on flavors of Unix,BSD, BeOS and QNX. AbiWord is already integrated into the GNOME desktop, andwhile Sun has said it wants to do the same for OpenOffice, such aconversion will take considerable time. Same for using an XML-based datafile format, which Sun says is a goal for OpenOffice but that AbiWord hasalready implemented. And it's not even clear that the open sourcedevelopers working on the OpenOffice project even consider GNOME's Gtklibrary a high porting priority; they may choose Mozilla's XULframework instead.

In any case, given the complexity of the OpenOffice code, getting it tosignificantly change direction (to any other desktop library, forinstance) is a task that will take months, maybe years. In themeantime, the GNOME Foundation seems hell-bent on kicking AbiWord off theteam long before OpenOffice's GNOME integration surpasses that ofAbiWord.

Back in August, AbiWord developer Dom Lachowicz approached the GNOME folkswith a requestto be a major participant in the GNOME Foundation. The reply he received: Pay to play.

"Basically I was told that to join the GNOME Foundation, we'd need tocontribute a bunch of money to the organization," Lachowicz said. While headded that Abi developers would still be able to participate somehow evenwithout contributing funds, they certainly had no say in the Foundation'sapparent done deed of changing GNOME Office's core word processor.What's more interesting is that the Foundation isn't even fully inplace -- it's not even due to have its first elections until next week.

According to GNOME developer Havoc Pennington, the decision making processso far has been limited to members of the closed gnome-hackers internal mailing list.I'm still trying to find out why the group needed to make a pronouncementon the Foundation's behalf before the Foundation was completely in place.Pennington also said that the actual decision was not what Sun isboasting. "The decision that was made is that we'll be taking the bestcode from Sun's code base and the existing GNOME Office code base," he said,"and trying to make the best possible GNOME Office out of it. This is justcommon sense."

Pennington is absolutely correct in his assessment, of course. But thenwhy does the GNOME Foundation need to decree common sense? Meanwhile, Sunis still saying that GNOME Office has been taken over by OpenOffice,and nowhere within the Foundation's PR machine is any denial orclarification of Sun's message. And GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza didn'thelp matters by clearly taking sides with OpenOffice, calling Abi "fairlylarval" in a recentinterview.

Off to a bad start
In theory, volunteer-based projects such as AbiWord are supposed to be onequal footing with vendor-backed efforts such as OpenOffice. But in ourfirst visible example of the GNOME Foundation's public presence, thatappears not to be the case.

To their credit, the AbiWord developers are simply moving ahead in theirefforts to make the world's best word processor, sounding at the very leastmore pupal than larval. Furthermore, those I spoke to are forthrightenough to acknowledge that the GNOME Foundation politics have had anadverse -- though temporary -- effect.

"It has made us a little more paranoid," Sevior said, "and hasenergized us to speed up Bonobointegration. I haven't noticed anybody leaving AbiWord for OpenOffice."

Another core AbiWord developer, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, agreed that an effectwas felt, but was not critical. "As far as GNOME goes, it might have beennicer if they had mentioned to us that they were planning to replace theirword processor (us) with OpenOffice beforehand," he said. "However, GNOMEhas never been our primary focus. Instead, we don't have a primaryplatform."

Well, I didn't have a lot of respect or confidence in the GNOME Foundationwhen it was formed earlier this year. And its first real action -- theadoption of OpenOffice at the expense of AbiWord -- certainly hasn't donemuch to redeem its image around here.

Meanwhile, it seems that the real benefit of having OpenOffice will be theability of developers to scavenge bits and piecesfor use in other open source projects. Not only will word processors benefit, but so will components of the former GNOME Office such as the Gnumeric spreadsheet and Dia diagraming program. As for word processors, not only will AbiWord benefit, butso will the KWord component of the KOfficesuite (that now ships with KDE'snewly-released version 2.0).

While the KDE folk haven't been party to the GNOME Foundation power plays,they've certainly been watching. The feeling I've received from talking tosome KOffice developers is well summed up in this unofficial commentary found at the KDEWeb site. The piece notes that efforts are already underway to isolatethe crown jewels of OpenOffice -- the Microsoft file format filters --with the intent of bringing theminto KOffice. I'm sure similar efforts are under way in the AbiWordcamp. (I also want to call attention to this Slashdotpiece by KDE core developer Kurt Granroth. In it, he offers theopinion that "pigs will probably fly" before there's a GNOME-likefoundation wrapped around KDE.)

In retrospect, we should still be be thankful for the releasing ofStarOffice, but not necessarily for the goals Sun had in mind. The biggestvalue of OpenOffice may well lie in specific parts rather than the wholebag of bits. In far less time than it will take to make this mass of codetotally GNOME-aware, other open source projects may be able to extract itsbest bits for their own use.

At that point, politics and foundations won't matter. In open source, thewinners aren't the ones with the biggest PR engines, they're the ones whospeak primarily through the quality of their work. We'll see who speaksloudest in this manner over the coming months.

For now, I'll still be using StarOffice to read the Microsoft Word,PowerPoint and Excel documents that people send to me. But I probablywon't spend much time getting to know StarOffice (or OpenOffice)intimately. I'll be keeping a close eye on KOffice and AbiWord and tryingout their new releases.

Where do you place your word processing bets? Tell Evan in the TalkBackbelow or in the ZDNetLinux Forum. Or write to Evan directly at evan@starnix.com.