Google Hiring Programmers to Work on OpenOffice

massysett writes "Google is hiring programmers to work on OpenOffice.org. "We use a fair amount of open-source software at Google. We want to make sure that's a healthy community. And we want to make sure open source preserves competitiveness within the industry," said Google's manager for open-source software. Perhaps Google's work will address an oft-heard complaint about OO.o: "Google believes it can help OpenOffice--perhaps working to pare down the software's memory requirements or its mammoth 80MB download size.""

Well

[justsomebody]

How about their free software for Linux first?

It's been a while....

[sfeinstein]

...since I've installed Office but is 80 MB really mammoth? That doesn't phase me. I only get mildly annoyed when I see a 500 MB or greater install, these days. Pretty crazy when you think back to the size of harddrives ten years ago.

Bugs

[Gr33nNight]

I am not being a troll but hopefully some of these programmers can help fix some of the http://qa.openoffice.org/iz_statistic.html [openoffice.org] 5721 bugs listed, some of which are from 2002!

My boss has made it a priority to seriously look at replacing MS Office with OpenOffice when that buglist gets below 1000. We shall see if that can happen.

Re:It's been a while....

[MightyMartian]

Size of the install seems an odd complaint. How big is MS Office? If people find that offensive, they can always send away for the CD. I would, however, like to see some of the memory bloat taken out.

Private sponsorship of public projects

[Trigun]

I am glad that Google is going to help out openoffice. I just installed OO2, and, although impressive, lacks the polish of a professional application. Hopefully Google can bring its minimalistic design to the codebase.

So much for Mac support

[illtron]

So much for ever getting a real Mac OS X version OpenOffice.org. Spare me your comments about NeoOffice and the X11 version working on OS X.

I know Google can't *stop* a Mac port, but they've got an awful track record of supporting Macs. I'm sure they won't direct any of their resources toward the recently announced new effort to build a Cocoa version.

Oh well. Pages is nicer anyway than OpenOffice, even if I do have to pay for it. It's a shame that the businesses and governments that would be willing to consider OpenOffice want it to have every ounce of the feature bloat that MS Office has.

Mammoth size?

[Random BedHead Ed]

or its mammoth 80MB download size.

Sure, its memory usage is a bit heavy (though it's worked fine for me), but 80 MB doesn't seem like such a big download, considering what you get. Microsoft Office now spans more than one CD. Even when you omit the media (images, clipart, etc.) that come with MS Office, OOo must still be considerably smaller.

Not that I'm criticising their intentions - if they make it even smaller than 80 MB I won't complain.

Re:Please join me in opposing this.

[antis0c]

Do you have any facts, references, sources of information, some kind of substantial data to back up your theory that Google is planning on hiring cheap Chinese or Indian workers to work on OO.o and paying them below minimum wage, or even below an accepted industry standard of wage for that particular job?

Re:It's been a while....

[garcia]

but is 80 MB really mammoth?

Compared to AbiWord, yeah, it's kinda mammoth. I think it's about 5MB for Windows. So, the Word Processor component is only ~5MB. Why does OO have to be over 10x as large and yet still load slow, be a memory hog, and be only mildly competitive in the Windows/MS Office world?

Mammoth?

[imemyself]

Now, I'm all for making things smaller if they can be, but how exactly is 80 megs a mammoth download? I mean the pre-beta of MS Office 12(really different interface btw, not sure that I like it), is like 1.2 GIGS. If anything I think OOo needs to start including clipart/multimedia/etc. Screw file size, features will be more important than that to most people. And if there's actually some poor guy out there will dial up he can just ask a friend for it.

Is Slashdot getting Slower

[Anonymous Coward]

This was reported last week in eWEEK.com

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1877924,00.as p [eweek.com]

More to the point, it seems to me that instead of catching news as it breaks, anymore Slashdot is days behind breaking news.

I won't even mention dupes. ;-)

Could folks be... I don't know, a little more proactive about what they turn in to Slashdot?

It's getting to be 'Old News for Nerds,' and that doesn't help anyone.

Jack

Revenge

[Tom]

Sounds very much like a "Hey Bill, before you think you can take away our toy, make sure you don't lose yours" move.

The day Google starts to write their own Linux desktop is probably the one where you should really, really get rid of that M$ stock...

Re:Bugs

[bernywork]

As RedHat said once, 'People complain about the bugs in our software, they refer to our bug database, and our outstanding bugs' (This isn't a direct quote but you know what I mean) that's because the bug database is open. How many bugs do you think are outstanding in Microsoft's Office code base?

Re:Or better yet

[miffo.swe]

Why should a PIM be part of an office suite? Next, OO bathtub and jacuzzi? It would be better if OO dont get into feature adding mode. Instead of adding features make the ones already there better. I would much prefer if people started new projects and forks instead of trying to cram anything possible into the succesful projects. Its just piggybacking. I hate thos plier/screwdriver/hammer/axe/nailpolisher combination thingies that does everything, just very very badly. Just like office suites. I do understand the need for integration between some office apps but mail clients and calendars? Nope, cant see the connection sir.

Go Google!

[openfrog]

This is a powerfull message to anyone being involved in the decision process over the state of Massachusetts: "We do support the Open Document standard!". A welcome move at a critical time.

Re:Please join me in opposing this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to dissuade you from working against the man or anything...

But damn, dude WTF!? You made some huge leaps in logic, mushing an article together with a freakin' /. comment and concluding that Google is out to destroy US programmers. Please stop tilting at windmills, and focus your energies on some wrongs that truly need righting.

Commoditization

[wolfemi1]

This is brilliant! If memory serves, the only two things Microsoft consistently makes money on are their OS and their office suite. Since MS has already "declared war" on Google, the smart thing to do might be to return fire, by commoditizing the operating system and office suite markets.

How do you commoditize an operating system? One way is to make web services that can be accessed by any standards-compliant browser. Check.

How do you commoditize an office suite? By backing and improving a free-of-charge office suite, and by providing coders, money, and publicity to the project. Check.

I wonder what MS will do now? I think that if they have to fight to maintain a monopoly against Google, IBM, Sun, and the entire F/OSS community, they may well have a losing battle.

Eventually.

Yeah, it's an office suite...

[WoTG]

I agree. For an entire office suite 80MB is quite reasonable to me. We're not talking about a one-task webbrowser. You get a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, drawing tool and more in that 80MB. I haven't looked recently, but I'm pretty sure that MS Office is at least 2 or 3 times that size on the CD.

80MB may be awkward for those on a dial up modem, but put into context, it isn't that bad. I suppose that it would be nice to modularize it so that bits are downloaded as needed. A 20MB base download in one language with other bits downloaded in the background or as needed would bring the base download time for a modem user down to about an hour.

Memory size consumption and start up time are bigger concerns to me. Oh, and a small web-plugin to read OOo files off websites would be excellent.

Re:It's been a while....

[Anonymous Coward]

is 80 MB really mammoth?

Compared with less than 20MB for (the much faster) KOffice? In any case, I don't think it's the download size per se that is the big deal, it's just that it's a convenient metric that roughly correlates to some sense of bloat.

Re:They already have

[DigitalRaptor]

You need to read "The World is Flat" by Thomas L. Friedman [amazon.com].

California minimum wage laws don't apply in India! Even if the company hiring them is in California.

I don't like outsourcing anymore than you do, and it is the primary reason I boycott Walmart, but it is what it is.

I commend you for being passionate about it and trying to do something about it. But you won't change the nature of outsourcing. You can avoid it, boycott it, and discourage it, but personally I don't think you can change it.

Thomas L. Friedman hits the nail right on the head, and America needs a boot to the head if we're going to survive the new transition.

Otherwise we'll end up just like stage coaches or any other industry that failed to adapt and tried to hang on to old models.

Memory Requirements

[Mantrid Drone]

...pare down the software's memory requirements or its mammoth 80MB download size...

Stripping all the Java crap out of there would be a good start.

Sun and Google working together...

[Short Circuit]

Of course, this is essentially the same thing as Google paying programmers to work for Sun, with control over what they work on.

Neat arrangement. Kinda like the USA offering financial aid to a poor country, but with control over what that aid gets spent on.

Re:Or better yet

[MightyMartian]

I think a PIM would be an excellent part of an Office suite. Being able to use it with ease to generate mail merges, modifying it through the database and spreadsheet apps. The reality is that email is part of the office system even if it isn't directly an office app.

Re:Doesn't this point to a weakness?

[potpie]

It seems to me that if companies like Google need to hire programmers to work on the "less glamorous" aspects of FOSS applications, that points out a significant weakness in the FOSS development model.

One may also say that if companies like Google are willing to hire programmers to work on those aspects, that points out a significant strength in the FOSS development model.

Hold the Praise and Hail the Software

[vectorian798]

Why is it that whenever Google does something, everyone is ready to praise them for pushing OSS etc? Google has much to gain from OSS software and advancements in it, because they use so much of it. Like any other company, they want to save where they can and that's all they are doing.

What we should be really doing is thanking the developers of OO. OO is a great program, especially given that it is relatively young and has to have a lot of functionality. As others have pointed out, 80MB is not at all massive for a program like OO. I am not sure what these speed issues others bring up are, it is quite fast for me. Whether it uses Java or not is irrelevant to the majority of users. You have to understand that most people don't care whether Java is closed or not. It is the final product's functionality that matters most, so quit your bitching.

What I think OO needs is a better interface and more of the lesser-used features that make MS Office such a complete suite. I know many of you think MS Office suffers from feature bloat, but there are always people who make use of a lot of the lesser known features (like Format Painter!) - for the stuff it packs in there, Office is quite blazingly fast. One bad example of bloat would be Eclipse, because when you have lots of features, speed and interface matter a LOT more. Hopefully, OO will get this right.

My 2c.

Re:Hosted OOo with browser interface

[pettau]

Indeed, although I doubt we'll see OO it's traditional form in browser x-y or z. I suspect this more of an effort to both improve the OO application base and (probably primarily) for Google to learn a bit about office suites for an eventual "ajax" type interface. Storage, security, etc. --I suppose --is par for the course.

Different Theory On Why

[RoadDogTy]

Predictably there are a lot of threads already (and presumably will be many more) about how Google's intent is to either combat Microsoft by offering a free & competetive Office suite, or to further develop Open Office in the interest of some sort of Google offering of Open Office as a hosted application. There could be some truth in both of these, however I think the main reason Google shows some token support for open source initiatives like this is simply so that developers (/.'ers included) will sit around and talk about how cool Google is, since OSS is very en vogue helping it is a very way to stay hip. Why else would Google (and other companies) fund/support initiatives like Wikipedia, etc. Its a method of low cost, and fairly effective, brand advertising.

Re:Hosted OOo with browser interface

[spagetti_code]

Doesn't have to be hosted on Google. If they produce an ajax office suite - it could be open source and run on the corporate server. Suddenly office PCs need only be a browser!

Wait... haven't we been here before.

Re:It's been a while....

[annex1]

Thta was exactly my thoughts. What on Earth, in the broadband age, gives someone the idea that 80Mb is "Mammoth"?!? That's rediculous. I have .PSD files almost that large. I decided to download OO to furthur my point, it took me just less than 6 minutes. 6 Minutes! Doesn't seem Mammoth to me. Then again, in this country there isn't many folks that still have dial-up. The U.S. hasn't really had much of a broadband adoption yet.

"Lacks the polish of a professional application"?

[Flying pig]

I don't agree. I can only assume you haven't used a lot of professional applications. Office is the exception rather than the rule for a really large app. If Office wasn't around, OO2 would be considered pretty good. But Office is not typical of the software industry. In fact, Microsoft's own server side tools are not as well finished as Office. Microsoft has to do something to justify the huge profits from Office and to keep users happy, because for most people the suite already does far more than they will ever need. But professional line of business applications need to be functional rather than pretty. (At the other end of the scale I keep seeing very "pretty" apps designed by people who are designers rather than coders, which look nice but actually seem to do very little.)

A smaller OO would be a Good Thing, but let's be clear; it would have a lot less functionality. A usability review which really took into account the actual needs of ordinary users and produced a cut down OO would probably improve speed and size quicker than rewriting the code base. If that's what you mean by "minimalistic design" then yes, I agree. I hope Google will produce a download-on-demand version of OO which starts with a minimal version and then downloads additional functionality as you need it, but I doubt that is what they intend for one moment, or that I can outguess the calibre of people that Google can recruit.

Makes Perfect Sense

[Jason Earl]

Google is investing in OO.org for the same reason that Sun, Red Hat, Novell, and even IBM (to a certain extent) are investing in OO.org. If Google can make OO.org a more useful competitor to MS Office for a nominal investment then that investment is definitely money well spent. This has little or nothing to do with Google's use of Free Software, and everything to do with the fact that with Microsoft Office is vulnerable. OO.org is actually pretty competitive, and Microsoft's upcoming format shift means that people are going to have to deal with format incompatibilities no matter what they decide to use.

Google execs know that Microsoft begins to lose sales of its ridiculously profitable office suite to OO.org that investors will demand that Microsoft stop focusing on new endeavors (like MSN) and focus on its bread and butter businesses. Increasing the viability of OO.org is almost certainly Google's most cost effective weapon in its fight against Microsoft.

Re:Doesn't this point to a weakness?

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

It seems to me that if companies like Google need to hire programmers to work on the "less glamorous" aspects of FOSS applications, that points out a significant weakness in the FOSS development model.

What part of the FOSS development model requires that all FOSS programmers be volunteers? One of the best parts of FOSS is that a small group of users (individuals or companies) can hire a FOSS developer as a consultant to add a particular feature they need. A proprietary software company might never add that particular feature, because they wouldn't see the long-term profit potential, but with FOSS you don't need the permission of some central authority - just find a programmer with the ability and willingness to do it.

It's good to be skeptical, but...

[Cid Highwind]

Tha OpenOffice development team is anything but small, and it's definitely not some loose collaboration of volunteers like some other OSS projects. Most of the current core developers are Sun employees and are paid for their work on OO.o. If things get messy it will be because Sun and Google have different goals, not because of corporate money-grubbing clashing with GNU/ideology.

Re:Kill Windows

[Teckla]

Could Eric's attempts to kill MS be anymore obvious? IIRC 40% of MS' profits are from Office. If people (read: companies) realize that free (and higher quality) is better than $300-600 / license (and lower quality) the open source world could start to get the penetration it needs to hit a tipping point.

Mod parent up. This is a good point.

All competitors of Microsoft - whether or not they're in the office suite business - would do well to consider donating developers and code to OpenOffice.org. It would hit Microsoft right where it hurts - in one of their two major cash cows - making it harder for Microsoft to compete in general (because less money would be flowing from their cash cows into their other divisions).

Throwing bodies?

[Ramses0]

Excuse me for being contrarian (and I don't have all the links), but TFA's headline is a good example of what's wrong: "Google throws bodies at OpenOffice"

OpenOffice is not self-sustaining. It only exists because people are being paid to work on it. I believe a decent link is the following...

http://www.openoffice.org/editorial/interview_joer g_heilig.html [openoffice.org]:
"""What is your role now in OpenOffice.org/StarOffice and what was your role in architecting the OpenOffice.org project at its inception?

I am responsible for the StarOffice engineering and in this role also responsible for all engineering work on OpenOffice.org done by Sun employees. At the time of OpenOffice.org's inception I was responsible for StarOffice's base technology and involved in all the engineering discussions around open sourcing StarOffice. """

IANAOSOSC (I am Not an Open Source Office Software Contributor)... but contrast that statement with AbiWord, KOffice, Evolution, InkScape, etc. (AbiWord and KOffice both had their versions of kernel-traffic-like summaries which allowed me keep up with various development issues and see how their insides worked at one point or another. OpenOffice needing an FTE to manage other FTE's who are writing code is a recipe for "code because we tell you to".

It seems like certain types of companies exist solely to make the most complicated build processes, technology decisions, etc. This is as opposed to the OSS way of "Keep it Simple, Stupid" ... when you start making it complex with $n+1 dependencies and steps the project either gets refactored or dies (and "Large(tm)" corporate invovlement generally has higher resistance to both the refactor and die options, as some areas seem to be personal vanity areas or have other political rather than technical motivations ... aka: Java).

http://ooo.ximian.com/hackers-guide.html [ximian.com]:

"""Building and hacking on OpenOffice.org (OO.o) entails climbing a fairly lengthy incline. Hopefully this document will make the learning curve somewhat steeper and more abrupt, and will give you a walking stick to help you out."""

Which isn't to say that having somebody "big" like Sun behind an office suite is all bad. It's because of them that we have the clippy-like thing, the chm-like thing, the templates, wizards, import filters, and all the other mostly boring "feature checkboxes" that we do now in OO.o.

If I could wave my magic wand and have everything the way that I want, I'd split out the OO input filters (seem to get really good reviews and good personal results). Kill the really-tight integration between Presenter, Writer, Drawer, etc... (although if that's the way MSOffice handles embedded tables, etc., maybe it's a necessary evil?). And a healthy helping of de-cruftify, especially the preferences panels. Maybe a FireFox-like project to strip down OpenOffice would be helpful.

Just my outsider's perspective....

--Robert

Re:So much for Mac support

[WWWWolf]

So much for ever getting a real Mac OS X version OpenOffice.org. Spare me your comments about NeoOffice and the X11 version working on OS X.

Okay, but I won't spare you from a small note that Google isn't the only one who contributes to OO.o. They may not exactly have a stellar record on supporting Mac on their own projects, but here, they're contributing stuff on a cross-platform package backed by folks who want to keep it running on Windows, Linux and (to a very small extent) OS X.

I don't think that sudden appearance of Google programmers makes OO.o Linux and OS X support magically disappear over night! That would be very silly!

Re:So much for Mac support

[ebuck]

How does assisting in one effort deny other efforts.

Assuming Google does NOTHING to help the MacOSX community, they will still make 00.org smaller, and that will still make it easier for those who do perform the port.

Brings up the suite question again

[PCM2]

As somebody else pointed out the last time OO.o was discussed on Slashdot, bundling all those applications together was more of a marketing innovation on Microsoft's part than a technical innovation. The idea is to create a perception that you get better "value" when you buy all those apps bundled together, even the ones you probably don't need to use very often. When all the apps are free, however, is there really any reason why you should have to install them all at once? Seems like you should be able to install one "core" package that includes any shared libraries and then add whichever of the apps you want.

Re:Sizes - Memory, Download

[TheRaven64]

A mail client like Thunderbird that runs on many platforms has to implement an addressbook as a component because it can't guarantee the host system will have one it can access / have one at all.

That's not writing cross platform code, it's writing bad code. What it should include is an abstract address book interface. This would be accompanied by instances that wrapped the features of the Windows, OS X / GNUstep, GNOME, KDE, etc. address books, and a fall-back that provided basic address book functionality if this was not available. On systems which have an address book, you would use the same one as all other programs and on others you would use your own.

This sounds like knights can conquer the HolyGrail

[gummyb34r]

Office suite is a killer app on any desktop platform. What about other companies (and what the hell - governments too!) who support and use open-source software get some money into the conquer of making OpenOffice better/usable? It is good PR for them and just good for all openoffice users. Well... is it too good to be true? The time for www.spreadopenoffice.org has come!

Re:So much for Mac support

[illtron]

NeoOffice is all well and good, but what we need is a cocoa port. No offense to the kind people who work on NeoOffice, but it's just not the same thing.

Re:It's been a while....

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you count what's necessary in KDE as well?

Of course not. The KOffice developers had the good sense to build on an existing, high-quality platform. If the OpenOffice developers can't/won't do that, then that's their business. It doesn't make OpenOffice any less bloated or any quicker, simply because I realise that OpenOffice duplicates functionality that my desktop environment already provides.

Re:Well

[Meagermanx]

Story time: My sister needed Microsoft Office for school. I told her about Open Office, showed it to her, told her it could do whatever MS Office could do, and offered to burn it to a CD for her, but she still insisted on spending $149.95 on Microsoft Office: Student Edition, because that's what her teachers were using.
 
It's a no-brainer, but a lot of people don't know about it, would rather buy than download, or just want a product they are sure is compatable with their teacher's/classmate's/coworker's/boss's software.
In the end, it'll catch on like Firefox: everybody who knows anything about computers will switch, everyone else will put up with Microsoft's crap, because they don't know any better.

Re:Well

[Bloater]

> it sure starts up a lot faster than Office ever did all those years ago when I still used it.

To be fair to Office, you're running OpenOffice on a lot faster hardware than you ran Office on all those years ago.

welcome to open source

[idlake]

OpenOffice is not self-sustaining. It only exists because people are being paid to work on it.

Almost all open source work is paid for. And there is nothing wrong with that: that's the way open source is supposed to work. The real problem is not that Google pays for OOo, but that not enough people have reason and cause to pay for other useful open source project development.

You are right that OOo's particular heritage and codebase discourages contributions and community development. That is a big problem. But I think if anybody knew how to fix that problem, they'd have found a silver bullet for software development. Once you decide to build a full-featured, integrated office suite in C++, an OOo-like mess follows. The Gimp, despite its community roots, is only slightly better (e.g., they have been unable to integrate 16/32 bit patches for many years now).

FOSS projects will only get more open and more hackable once people move to other languages and runtimes. C# and Objective C are modest improvements in opening up software, but we probably still need more than that.