Is the OpenOffice.org Project in Good Health?

That’s a question that’s being brought up in a semi-recent blog post by OOo developer Michael Meeks, and it’s a good one. While companies like Microsoft can afford a large team of developers to dedicate themselves to working on their product, OpenOffice depends mostly on volunteer work, and as it seems lately, the state of that support seems to be in question.

Michael takes a look at things from a few different perspectives. He aggregated stats from the commit logs to see who were contributing code to the project, who wasn’t, and who seems to be in some sort of hiatus. The findings are pretty interesting, with the vast majority of code being contributed from Sun themselves. To make things even worse, the number of external developers has decreased substantially over the past few years.

I’ve complained about OpenOffice in the past, specifically with regards to its design, but I’m having an easier time seeing exactly why that’s the case. If there’s a lack of developers, then the entire project is going to slow to a crawl. This is a bad thing, though, because it’s nice to have an alternative, especially a free one, to paid office applications, such as Microsoft Office. I’m no developer, and I have no recommendations for the project, but hopefully things can improve sooner than later. This is one project that’s far too valuable to lose.

Differences: most obviously, magnitude and trend: OO.o peaked at around 70 active developers in late 2004 and is trending downwards, the Linux kernel is nearer 300 active developers and trending upwards. Time range – this is drastically reduced for the Linux kernel – down to the sheer volume of changes: eighteen months of Linux’ changes bust calc’s row limit, where OO.o hit only 15k rows thus far.