Why open source developers don't love OpenOffice

At UKUUG Brighton this last weekend, I was struck by the very tepid attitude to OpenOffice.org (OOo) by open source developers. Why, I wondered, did developers not rush to embrace OOo as a prime opportunity to promote open source, reduce the market share of the incumbent and make the world a better place? Asking around, I get a wide range of answers, but several themes rapidly emerged:

• Developers use text editors and integrated development systems, not word processors. Not using OOo on a daily basis removes the primary motivation of many open source developers—OOo just doesn't directly effect their daily lives.
• Reproducing an existing application is technically un-interesting. A number of developers are motivated by technical challenge in much the same way that mountaineers are motivated by the the height of mountains and OOo just isn't interesting to them.
• No software project developers care about is dependent on OOo. Many developers end up helping out with a boring project because an interesting project they are interested in depends on it. OOo has very few such dependent projects (with the exception of import/export filters for formats such as TEI)
• OOo is not built using the open source development methodology. OOo is not planned, structured, implemented or run as a typical open source software development project, which makes it much harder for open source developers to to contribute on a casual basis.

There were others (such as the very persuasive Michael Meeks), who were of the opinion that OOo was the best thin since sliced bread.