Matt Asay weighs in today on whether OpenOffice is "profoundly sick," as Novell employee Michael Meeks claims it is. Meeks argues that OpenOffice is "not getting better with age" and that a big part of the problem is that Sun Microsystems exerts too much control over the suite, not allowing more contributors to innovate and improve.

OpenOffice.org developer and Novell employee Michael Meeks calls OpenOffice "profoundly sick" and chides Sun for retaining too much control over the project for its own good. He's right, and here's why.

Is OpenOffice.org (OOo), the popular free office application, "a profoundly sick project," as developer Michael Meeks alleges? Or are his comments a poorly concealed effort to promote Go-OO, Novell's version of OOo, as the anti-Novell lobby suggests?

Free office solution OpenOffice.org is still in the best of shape, based on reactions from project members to Novell developer Michael Meeks's recent pessimistic view. The Linux Foundation is one of many who are concerned. All want one thing: more.

A group of OpenOffice.org developers has announced the creation of an independent foundation - called the Document Foundation - to guide the further development of the office suite, which is provisionally named LibreOffice. At the heart of this effort is longtime OpenOffice.org developer Michael Meeks.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is 167 days away, but who's counting? Maybe the software developers are counting because they have a whopping 2,278 issues targeted for this release. Even though OpenOffice.org 2.4 is not yet out the door, let's see how far they've come with OpenOffice.org 3.0.

IBM's prospective (and as yet hypothetical) acquisition of Sun Microsystems could well give Meeks and other developers the chance to confirm their belief that a truly open developer-driven community centred around an independent foundation has the capacity to rejuvenate and enhance OpenOffice.org

In this article I would like to give some insights into what the real issues are between Novell and and rest of the OpenOffice.org project, the now famous JCA, what I think a solution could be, and where I think OpenOffice.org is heading.

Novell-developer Michael Meeks finds strong words for Sun's management of the free office suite in an interview - Pushes for own OOo flavor and talks about KDE/GNOME-unification