WishX Posted July 30, 2002 Share Posted July 30, 2002 OpenOffice Gets Its OS X Story Straight By Masha Zager NewsFactor Network July 30, 2002 http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18805.html Until Sun clarified its position regarding StarOffice and OpenOffice for the Mac, volunteer programmers were left wondering about Sun's intentions. The difficulties of managing a corporate-sponsored open source project were highlighted late last week when an incorrect news report about OpenOffice.org took both Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) and the OpenOffice.org community by surprise. OpenOffice.org is the open source version of StarOffice, Sun's office productivity suite, for which Sun released the source code in 2000. The OpenOffice.org community includes Sun employees and as many as 55,000 volunteers. The project is among the largest joint development projects between the corporate world and the open source community. Other examples include Mozilla, sponsored by Netscape, and Darwin, sponsored by Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) . Blindsided by Sun? On Thursday, OpenOffice.org released an alpha version of OpenOffice for Mac OS X , along with a call for volunteers to help bring the Mac version to completion. However, the OpenOffice community was startled when an article appeared the following day on an online news site stating that Sun and Apple were collaborating on developing StarOffice for Mac. That news, if true, would not have posed a problem. OpenOffice and StarOffice versions already coexist for several operating systems, including Solaris and Linux. While OpenOffice is free, StarOffice charges a licensing fee and includes technical support and additional functionality, such as spell-checking and database management. But volunteers were unhappy because they felt they had been blindsided by Sun, which had assured them it had no plans for a Mac version of StarOffice. According to Ed Peterlin, the lead programmer for the Mac OS X port, they would have expected to hear this news from Sun long before reading about it in the media. Communications Glitch Until Sun clarified its position on Monday, volunteer programmers were left wondering about Sun's intentions. They knew that their own contributions, as well as Sun's, were necessary for the project to succeed. "Without Sun's contribution, there wouldn't have been enough resources to get the project done," Peterlin told NewsFactor. "But the community picked up the ball and ran to the end zone with it." As it turned out, the story was based on a misunderstanding. Sun Microsystems spokesperson Marie Domingo confirmed on Monday that the Sun-Apple collaboration actually took place before Sun decided to release the source code for StarOffice, and that Sun's current plans for a Mac version are focused on OpenOffice rather than StarOffice. Education on Open Source Communication problems arose from the fact that few people understand how the OpenOffice.org project is organized. "Sun has failed to communicate that the community is not Sun, but rather that Sun is just one member of the community," said Peterlin. "The first thing I have to do when meeting people is explain how we aren't employed by Sun." He added that "Sun has been discussing with the community how to get the message across." Zaheda Bhorat, the Sun manager for the OpenOffice.org project, agreed that educating folks on open source is a challenge. She described one of her major responsibilities as "helping the community, press, users and Sun employees understand the open source model." Managing Casts of Thousands Another challenge is posed by the project's sheer size and complexity. In coordinating a huge global effort where most of the participants have never met face-to-face, "sometimes information needs to be clarified and recommunicated," Bhorat told NewsFactor. According to Peterlin and Bhorat, Sun has paid programmers working on the project, while volunteers suggest fixes and enhancements to the product and do additional programming, project coordination, testing, documentation, translation, end-user support and marketing. "Many of our community requests for new items have a response of 'Great, if you think this is important, go ahead and start it,'" Bhorat explained. A Do-It-Yourself Project The upside of community participation is the absence of bureaucracy. Legend has it that the Hungarian translation of OpenOffice was generated by a group of students holed up for three days with an ample supply of pizza, soda and, presumably, some dictionaries. "The community moves at an incredible pace when it wants to accomplish something," Bhorat told NewsFactor. "There is no slacking. This group certainly keeps you on your toes. Large corporations have processes and procedures that are not able to respond with such a fast turnaround." Even the latest communications glitch turned out to have a silver lining. News of the supposed Sun-Apple collaboration drew so many new volunteers to the Mac OS X porting project that "it's been hard to keep track of the sheer volume of messages," according to Peterlin. Over the course of a weekend, many of the known bugs in the system were fixed. The story "got people interested enough to look and learn more," Peterlin said. "In a roundabout way, that's what I've been trying to do." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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