“Release early. Release often.” is a common cry among open-source projects. However, the full quotation adds “And listen to your customers.” which is where things get interesting.

I asked an innocent question on the OpenOffice.org Project Leads mailing list about how we end up with the various flavours of OpenOffice.org that appear in Linux distributions. I was duly pointed to ooo-build (distros’ OOo), and started an at times heated exchange of views that is still rumbling on today. The debate is important not just for OpenOffice.org, but also for any open-source project entering the mass market.

• “Release early. Release often.” In the red corner, we have independent developers who find it hard going to get their work accepted by the OpenOffice.org Community core developers. They complain bitterly that other open-source projects which have a liberal policy attract more developers, generate more code, and if that includes bugs, “just open up and speed up development and quality will improve in the end”.

• “And listen to your customers.” In the blue corner, the OpenOffice.org Community team complain that the code getting into distros via ooo-build is of demonstrably poorer quality – measured by user feedback. Ubuntu gets an especially bad press – the standard response to anyone reporting a bug in Ubuntu OpenOffice.org is to get them to replace it with the Community OpenOffice.org. The ooo-build code also doesn’t benefit from all the work done by the Community localisation teams.

This is not just an internal matter for OpenOffice.org. With Ubuntu now being shipped by Dell, this means that OpenOffice.org as a brand runs the risk of getting a bad name for quality. End users of Ubuntu do not always appreciate they are actually taking part in an ongoing and never ending user acceptance test for ooo-build developers, as part of an implicit contract for using open-source.

Maybe the time has come to start to brand clearly Community OpenOffice.org as opposed to variants. At least that way users know what they are getting.

And yes, I do have Ubuntu on this laptop, and no, since I installed Feisty Fawn in April I haven’t been bothered to replace Ubuntu OpenOffice.org with Community OpenOffice.org. Just wait till I hit my first bug though…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 9:12 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.