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Though spun out by Sun Microsystems Inc. in 2000, OpenOffice.org remains almost totally under the control of Sun employees working full-time on the project. Will IBM save the project from itself?

“What’s the biggest threat to the success of OpenOffice.org? Is it Microsoft Office? Is it the simple fact that Dell doesn’t offer it with computers? Not according to some participants in the ‘open’ source project itself, they say the biggest problem with OO.o is the fact that Sun codes, owns & makes all key decisions for the project when it should be more community oriented.

Is Sun missing the cultural point?

There are “enough developers frustrated by both the technical and the organizational infrastructure at OpenOffice.org” that it is “a real problem that is weighing on the project,” said D’Arcus, a university geography professor who participates in the project.

That has long hurt OpenOffice.org’s attempts to recruit and, moreover, keep contributors that are not paid by Sun or other leading backers such as Novell or Google Inc. to work on OpenOffice.org.

“OpenOffice.org has a very central business process of controlling what comes into the source base and by that very system misses the point of Open Source development,” said Ken Foskey, an Australian open-source developer who volunteered for OpenOffice.org for three years. He left in 2005 after becoming “increasingly frustrated” with the organization’s bureaucracy.

Scott Carr, a community member of OpenOffice.org, acknowledges he has lost two key members of his already-small documentation team.

“I understand where some of [the criticism] is coming from,” he said.

Enter IBM, accompanied by Symphony

So does IBM Corp., which is joining OpenOffice.org and creating its own free version called Lotus Symphony, aimed at its enterprise and government customers.

“We think that there’s a broad-based consensus that some governance and structural changes are in order that would make the OpenOffice project more attractive to others,” Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM’s Lotus Software, said in an interview last week. “It’s no secret that this has been an issue for us for some time, and we haven’t viewed OpenOffice.org as being as healthy as it might be in this respect.” Besides committing 35 China developers to OpenOffice.org, IBM plans to make its voice heard — immediately and loudly. IBM will “work within the leadership structure that exists.”

Convincing the mouse to roar again

Another problem with Sun is that it has taken an increasingly passive position in the past several years against OpenOffice.org’s chief rival, Microsoft. Out is ex-CEO Scott McNealy, who was famous for his scripted put-downs of Microsoft, and in is Jonathan Schwartz, whose tenure has been marked by an increasing cooperation with what once was Sun’s symbolic bogeyman.

But will Sun be willing to relinquish some or most of its control over OpenOffice.org? IBM’s Poulley thinks the transition has already begun. Simply “by virtue of our joining, OpenOffice.org becomes a lot less Sun-dominated,” he said.

Source: ComputerWorld