Solaris Developer Chat Sessions

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July 19, 2001

Chat Title: OpenOffice.org
Guest Speaker: Max Lanfranconi

This is a moderated chat

LizA: Hello, and welcome to Solaris Live! Our guest today is Max Lanfranconi, Senior Product Manager for OpenOffice.org at Sun Microsystems. Max is reponsible for providing technical expertise to the Sun and CollabNet teams as well as the OpenOffice.org community in building the Open Source office suite. Max, let me start by asking, "What is OpenOffice.org?"

Max: OpenOffice.org is the Open Source project for StarOffice. Sun Microsystems put the StarOffice code on the website http://www.openoffice.org on October 13th 2000, so it's just above 9 months old now. The job was not easy at all. You have to consider that, before open sourcing a code that has been on the market for some time, Sun had to "clean it" and get rid of all the third-party intellectual property code. The code also needed to have the comments translated from German into English, to allow a greater number of developers to participate.

LizA: So, what are the differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org?

Max: Well, this happens to be one, if not *the*, most frequently asked question on our site. The initial release of the code to OpenOffice.org was the code of what will become the next version of StarOffice.

Max: Then of course there are some major differences between the current version of StarOffice (5.2) and OpenOffice.org The first difference is that the desktop is "gone away". That has been one of the most NOT wanted features.

Max: Then of course, because of the fact that we could not open source third-party code, in the initial release we did not have printing or spellchecking.

Max: Luckily enough, the Open Source model is working really well and, in less than a year both a printing engine and a spellchecker have been contributed by our community.

LizA: How big is the OpenOffice.org community?

Max: Well, we are still growing, but the last figures are more than 3,000 community members and more that 250,000 downloads of the code. Also interesting is that we had about 70,000 downloads of the source code.

Herbert: Will the help system and documentation be open sourced?

Max: Herbert, There is a whiteboard project currently ongoing that is doing a good job in terms of help and documentation.

Max: The whiteboard project is a very interesting place where spontaneous contributions from the community happen. It has much less stringent coinstraints compared to a "traditional" project.

Max: As a matter of fact, some of the previous whiteboard modules have become, with time, "official" projects inside OpenOffice.org.

Philipp: From the 3000 how many code/translations/whatever contributions get checked in?

Max: Philipp, the current number of people actually committing code/translations is twelve.

Max: Even if it looks like a low figure, keep in mind that more "aged" open source projects like Apache have a similar ratio of subscribers/committers but it took some years to get there. We did that in only nine months. Also, the amount of code and its complexity is rather overwhelming. And twelve is the number of people that commit directly. There are a number of people that just submit patches that are committed by others.

Martin Hollmiche: I think the number is higher. There are more than a dozen persons in the porting project which have contributed code, fixes, and issues.

stx: And the technical infrastructure for the help system will be published.

Martin: What are you doing to make the project seem less daunting to new people interested in helping with the development of OpenOffice.org?

Max: Martin, I agree. As I said, there are quite a number of people that contribute, even without commit access. And that's a good question...

Max: There are some projects that are easier than others. There is a lot going on in porting, localization, documentation, in the whiteboard. These are all good places to start. Then, as experience and familiarity with code increases, you might be willing to explore more difficult tasks...

Scott_Carr: About the documentation: we have a very motivated group of people working on the Whiteboard-Doc project. We are answering questions and adding them to the FAQs fairly quickly. The project as a whole has only been going for about 1.5 months now, but we already have a pretty good basis on which to continue. These FAQs are also being translated into French and Italian.

Markus: Does anyone know if there are plans for integration with SAP and the GUI- front end? That's currently the main reason for us not switching to OO.

Max: Scott_Ca, thanks for your contributions!!!!

Max: Markus, Integration with SAP and GUI. You mean SAP GUI?

Markus: Max, Yes. While I personally am not aware of any integration with SAP, there might be someone in the community willing to try that. I suggest that you subscribe to our discuss mailing list and try and post your question there. mailto:discuss-subscribe@openoffice.org

siva: With the corporate licensing and activation problems of MS OfficeXP, there seems to be a good opportunity for OpenOffice to gain more acceptance in the business and consumer community. Is this benfit perceived and is something being done about it?

Max: siva, while I do agree with your point, you have to keep in mind that OpenOffice.org is, by definition, aimed at developers rather than end users. The main disclaimer on the site states that the code is in a pre-alpha phase and should not be used as a commercial application. Of course, the stability is growing fast and we will reach some point where it will be good enough for end users, too.

stx: What is planned for O'Reilly conference?

Max: stx, Thanks for asking about O'Reilly. OpenOffice.org will participate at O'Reilly Open source conference in San Diego next week. We will be showing the last build of OpenOffice.org, demo-ing the integration between a Java application and OpenOffice.org; showing an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet that gets populated by an RMI Java server that gets live data from NASDAQ and fills spreadsheet cells....

Max: We will also show another interesting demo that involves NetBeans, the open source Java IDE. We will show how it is possible to implement new formulas into an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet, by writing the Java code associated with the new formulas in NetBeans. You are all invited!!!

Markus: Max, I already did that (subscribing) but I didn't post the question yet. The MS-Office packet is highly integrated in the SAPGUI, they use some controls, data can be immediately "downloaded" and put into an Excel sheet and the like. Most of our users here use these features and it would be great having at least one alternative for that - as Siva said due to licensing issues by MS. I'm unfortunately not a hardcore developer but I would indeed help in integrating this if someone could lead me to the right direction :-)

Max: I must confess that I am not familiar with SAP at all :-| My experience with the API of OpenOffice.org showed that it is quite possible to implement a rather strong interaction between, say, a Java application (but it could be also C++) and OpenOffice.org. On paper it should be feasible. The only concern is: how well documented and accessible are SAP APIs in order to try to do that?

Martin: Do you think there will ever be an OpenOffice 1.0 release? Or will the Sun branded StarOffice be the only application to come from OpenOffice.org?

Max: We all hope that it will happen sooner or later...

Max: Also, consider that nobody says that you can't use OpenOffice.org as an application. It is just that it will be the leading edge technology. If you run a company and are risk averse, you might want to consider StarOffice. While if you are more the hacker kind, then go for OpenOffice.org.

Scott_Carr: When is the new Help System file format going to be complete?

Max: Hey, you are not asking for a roadmap in an Open Source project, are you ? :-)

Max: The serious answer really is: it is too early to give a date right now...

Martin: If I might point out some things which I see as problems... 1. The time lag between the OOo releases and the builds used by the Hamburg crew is quite long - making it very difficult for external people to keep up. 2. The almost total lack of documentation and number of comments in German hidden in the depths of the code. 3. The lack of an LXR repository

Max: Martin, Why should external people be concerned about Hamburg builds when they have access to OOo releases only?

Martin Hollmiche: Martin, Feel free to file issues if you discover too many German comment in important code.

Max: Martin, what is an LXR repository? I am afraid I have no idea about it.... :-(

Martin: So, OpenOffice.org will never maintain seperate ‘stable’ and ‘development’ branches?

Max: Martin, we do have stable builds. Current stable build is 627. And everything inside CVS is tagged with the build number.

Martin Hollmiche: OpenOffice633 has been annonounced to be a stable branch.

Martin: Max, if an external developer wishes to get the latest revision of any file, the dependancy chain of the number of files that would also need to be updated, and the number of incompatible build problems mean that it is almost impossible for an external developer to get a reasonably up to date working build.

Martin Hollmiche: I look forward to seeing the 633 build on many platforms and languages.

Max: Martin, While I agree that sometimes it is difficult, it can be done. The guys in Ireland deal with this kind of problem almost daily. The only way to cope with them is tracking the tagged CVS version. See also the release mailing list archives.

Martin: But declaring a snapshot of development in progress as ‘stable’ doesn't make it so. Perhaps it is necessary to change the versioning used for OOo builds to be 0.1, next build 0.1.2 instead of what is commonly interpreted as 6.2.7 etc.

Max: Martin, the build number is not yet a version. As we still are officially in a pre-alpha stage.

LizA: Max, thank you for being with us today...you've fielded a lot of questions. Do you have any last comments you'd like to make?

Max: Liza, I have a final posting to make...

Max: Please feel free to keep on asking more questions either to myself: massimo.lanfranconi@sun.com or, better to the mailing lists on OpenOffice.org: subscribe-discuss@openoffice.org And, of course come and visit the site daily, we will have something new for you!!! Thanks everybody and talk to you soon on OpenOffice.org

LizA: Thanks Max, and everyone who joined us today. I look forward to chatting with you all again on Thursday 16 August, 10 a.m. PDT, when my guest is Martin Hack and the topic is "Security/Trusted Solaris".

July 19, 2001

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