CIO Today ran a piece on open source software and included some comments from Forrester's Michael Goulde, who made some rather disparaging comments about OpenOffice.org. What follows is my response, sent to both Michael and the editors of CIO Today.
I'm impressed by Forrester's Michael Goulde's comments re: OpenOffice.org in your recent article by Jack M. Germain on open source software.
Specifically, Michael is quoted:
By way of example, he points to OpenOffice. "The actual code for the first version was spaghetti," he said. "The code for 2.0 isn't much better. This is going to be a bear to continue to evolve, and they should probably start from scratch. It's no accident that in Forrester surveys OpenOffice usage barely shows up."
What impresses me?
I'd be interested to better understand how Michael knows about the quality of the OpenOffice.org source code, and by what he judges that codebase quality against. Does Michael, for instance, contrast the OpenOffice.org codebase quality against the Microsoft Office codebase?
I presume not, as few outside Microsoft have seen enough to know of the quality or lack thereof of Microsoft's source code. How then has Michael been able to make that comparison?
on May 7, 2006, 10:12 am
I asked the OpenOffice.org developers about the comment in the article,
see:
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on September 7, 2008, 10:22 pm
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on July 25, 2006, 7:31 am
underlying software code probably does a lot to encourage developers to
take some pride in their work and clean up their act.
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