Brown made some valid points. I’m not sure buggy is the correct term to be using in all cases. The word wrap problem may or may not be a bug. It could be just a feature that OOO doesn’t have. I seem to remember when MS Excel didn’t do word wrapping for cell notes either. When the cell notes (comments) feature was first added the programmers didn’t think anyone would write notes long enough to warrant word wrapping in a cell. They found out they were wrong. For a long time Quattro Pro had a feature where you could color the tabs in a spreadsheet. We used MS Excel at work which didn’t have this feature. With every updated we would wish for this feature. It took them for ever to offer this feature, seemed like years. In fact there was a lot of features that Quattro Pro had that MS Excel didn’t have for the longest time. Corel took over Quattro Pro and removed some of the features to make it more like MS Excel. After complaints they added back some of the removed features. None of these things are really bugs, it just there way of setting up the program.

One thing that could speed up new features for OOO would be for someone to publish a side by side comparison of features compared to MSO. One could even rate which features should be added or updated first.

Thank you for your comment. I don’t know if you noticed the Slashdot discussion. To an outsider like me, the main point that stood out was that the “huge and forbidding codebase” was indeed the biggest problem. Like the other huge programming projects around (not least Microsoft Office) OOo seems to be a massive lump of interconnected code, and correcting anything in it is likely to break something else. Leaving the zealots to one side, the other overall impression was that an open-source project has to be born open source, both to ensure that it has the right structure and to ensure that it has the right community backing it.

My late father can recall when the only book one could buy was hard covered. Then we progressed to the softcover pocket book, that sold at 1/100th the price. Today, we read more (for free) from the net, then elsewhere.

Due to the internet, which Microsoft preceded, that company, at it’s start, had to go it alone to manage and repair bugs. Today, with the net, the world is full of bug-killers.

In short, the internet, and currency differences are driving the Open Software market, not to mention what satisfaction to one’s ego is obtained by working on the improvement of a world class product.

A closing question. “Why are there artists in the world who produce for joy and hobby? Do we only want those who produce for profit? Why then do we do art for “joy”? ” In my mind, working on a major software product is “soul food”.

My bottom line is, there is no stopping Open Free software.

Leslie in Montreal.

It’s a nice idea. But it has been tried several times, and never worked. I think Mark Shuttleworth had a bug bounty on OOo for a while. There seem to me to be two problems. The first is that most of the bugs are in the bits of the program that 90% of the users don’t touch. So the pool of potential buys is much smaller than it looks. The second is that there just aren’t enough developers who know their way around this huge and forbidding codebase.