One of the joys of working on open-source projects like OpenOffice.org is that there is a huge number of highly creative and passionate people from all over the world who ‘lurk’ on mailing lists. Then suddenly something catches people’s attention, and the whole community bursts into life – often in the most unexpected places.

For example, OpenOffice.org has a Website discussion list: Post questions about the look, operation, and functionality of the OpenOffice.org website here. This has just erupted into life with discussions about:

• attracting more contributors to the project (ok, this has been heard before)
• challenging the way that we view the whole idea of ‘the office suite’
• should we be marketing OpenOffice.org’s underlying office software technologies as a product in its own right?

OpenOffice.org has traditionally viewed itself as a community producing a free office software package equalling any commercial product:

To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.

This alternative view from our developers says we are engineers of intrinsically useful software components – such as a module to produce charts. We currently assemble those into discrete applications – such as Calc – because that’s what the end-user market has come to expect – a spreadsheet. The bundle of Calc, Writer, Impress, etc then becomes the OpenOffice.org Office Suite.

However, these intrinsically useful software components are equally usable by developers, systems integrators, etc in third party software products – e.g. the chart module could be used in PeopleSoft (possibly over Larry Ellison‘s dead body ). We should be marketing those with equal prominence.

Equally, there is no reason why we should feel constrained by the conventional applications like ‘a wordprocessor’, ‘a spreadsheet’ … why not build something completely new from these intrinsically useful components?

This discussion has only just started, I suspect…

This entry was posted on Friday, November 24th, 2006 at 9:02 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.