Luis Villa revisited criticisms of OpenOffice.org after two years, and recently posted What OpenOffice.org is Still Doing Wrong. His thesis is that Firefox, rising from the ashes of Mozilla (okay, maybe not phrased that strongly, but I like the image), represents a better strategy for making usable and easily adoptable software.
Of course, feature-for-feature compatibility seems like an obvious goal, but reducing the technical debt of a project almost always pays off.
Funny, I have been using both Firefox and OpenOffice.org on my Linux machines for years, and the idea that one has got fast and lean and the other hasn't - well, as they say, YMMV.
However, it seems to me that Luis is completely missing the point. OpenOffice.org is an open-source project. If you want something fixed in an open-source project - performance, whatever - get hacking. If you can't hack, go to the nearest hackers' meeting and start buying beers. If you've got more serious money, hire some hackers and pay their mortgages as well as their beers.
Pontificating in a blog might boost the ego, but as Joseph Stalin might have said, how many hackers has Luis Villa?
John, when it takes three days to get a result from the OO.o test suite, there's something wrong. That makes me not want to touch the project. Am I a hypocrite for saying that?