Last night I have a dream about a furher release of OpenOffice.org. This release contained a huge update of the software, which allows more modern style of drawing with drop shadows, blur, full clear-type rendering and fading menus.
OpenOffice.org really need those features, because I’t feels like an software from the 19th century. The development of the program seems to be painful slow at this point, and it’s today painfully slow.
I think the big issue with open source software is the lackless of safe handling of memory. Because the development of the application is done by diffrent developers around the world, they are lack on the control of a shared policy for memory handling. This means primarly that diffrent developers handles the memory usage in diffrent way, opening for conflicts between program features. Commercial software are developed by a closed team, which are aware of a colloborate standard for memory handling.
Memory handling is a developers most boring and important work, to make a program stable. And because Open Source software developers primarly are focused on a implementing features, they forget the required handling of the memory.
The range of those problem can be controlled by a good organisation, who takes good care of the code contributions and making sure to check them really so there isn’t any conflicts between the bransches.
