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Michael Meeks
people.gnome.org/~michael · Personal blog · on HN since 2010
Michael Meeks, a LibreOffice developer, writes progress reports on the project, plus talks on open source engineering and onboarding developers.
What HN saysHN links it for LibreOffice internals and slide decks on understanding large codebases, as well as his comments on the OOXML standard.
34HN people shared it
18linked it in comments
35stories submitted
487story points
6 years agolast shared
2010people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1LibreOffice under the hood: progress to 5.05 people · 11 points · first shared 2015 · 4 comments on HN
- 2LibreOffice under the hood: progress to 4.4.03 people · 53 points · first shared 2015 · 5 comments on HN
- 3Marketing in Vendor Neutral FLOSS Projects3 people · 7 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 4What's been happening in the LibreOffice world?3 people · 7 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 5Interacting with new Developers [pdf]3 people · 4 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 6Solving arbitrary problems from a standing start or Real World Engineering [pdf]3 people · 3 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 7LibreOffice under the hood: six months of progress to 5.32 people · 15 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 8LibreOffice under the hood: a year of progress from 5.0 to 5.22 people · 10 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 9The history and prehistory of LibreOffice [pdf]2 people · 6 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 10A LibreOffice/Apache OpenOffice Comparison2 people · 5 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 11Making Collabora Online trivial to setup2 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 12LibreOffice On-Line and IceWarp2 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 13Collabora Online Development Edition 2.02 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 14OOXML SDK project opened up2 people · 1 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 15Bloat reduction in LibreOffice 3.4.01 people · 102 points · first shared 2011 · 7 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
davidgerard · 2016-09-11
ECMA 376 is explicitly intended as documentation of what Office 2007 does. Michael Meeks of LO (then at Novell) worked on it and says it did this job: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2014-02-26-cabinet-office.html#…
But in practice there's no such thing as "OOXML" - there's only what Office 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2016 happen to do. So if you want to work with the stuff, you verify everything. The standard is, like so much Microsoft documentation, best treated as based-on-a-true-story fiction with an unreliable narrator.
niftich · 2018-01-18
He has a slide deck [1] that he links to in the interview, where he tries to highlight some challenges with grokking large codebases, and techniques one can use to compartmentalize understanding and build from there. I found it both a bit too colloquial yet also too opaque, but there's some useful nuggets in there.
It also speaks to a significant problem: large codebases are inherently difficult to understand, which forms a barrier to entry. This is despite the fact that most software makes use of various abstractions to break problems into smaller parts.
In the general sense, I believe it's worth thinking about how the particular abstraction mechanisms used in software impact a new contributor's productivity, vs. the productivity of someone more familiar with the codebase, especially for projects that are developed in the open, or with high developer turnover.
[1] https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2016-04-29-solving-problems.pdf
senko · 2020-09-28
StartOffice was German and when LibreOffice was forked, a massive effort was started to translate and update tens of thousands of German comments from the code base so the new developers who do not speak the language can safely navigate and contribute.
The effort lasted for years: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under-the-hood-5-0.h…
iainmerrick · 2017-08-16
OK, so I googled around a bit more and found a useful presentation on LibreOffice internals: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2014-05-13-iwocl-libreoffice.pd…
Looks like it is indeed identifying large groups of cells with common formulas, and running those calculations on the GPU.
adrianN · 2017-01-18
Libreoffice managed to get rid of their legacy containers and moved to the STL, so maybe you can do it too
https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2011-05-12-libre.odp
dfrankow · 2016-01-23
A detailed post related to this: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2013-06-13-under-the-hood.html
ronjouch · 2015-08-18
> I don't think they're adding new features.
Wrong, tons of new features land in major releases. Here are the release notes for the feature-packed 5.0, released a few weeks ago: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.0
In addition to this, yes, refactoring is going on: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under-the-hood-5-0.h…
mlinksva · 2015-03-25
More informative post about this from the lead LibreOffice developer https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-03-25-libreoffice-icewarp.…
fafner · 2015-01-29
There are actually changes to mail merge in this release. But it seems it is about performance and not the UI.
https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-01-29-under-the-hood-4-4.h…
chris_wot · 2015-01-21
Ah, but it will be a full-blown app - the plumbing is there :-)
If you want a better breakdown, check out Michael Meeks writeup: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-01-21-android-viewer.html
drchaos · 2013-02-07
There's a in-browser version of LibreOffice being worked on since quite some time (first announcement was in 2011[1]), but there's not much information online about the current status.
They have video[2] and a wiki page[3] which at least shows how to enable it (custom build required):
[1] http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/10/14/libreoffice-conference-a…
[2] http://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2011-10-10-lool-demo.webm
[3] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Using_LibreOffice_in_a_Web_Browser
billybob · 2012-06-01
Glad to see this, and kudos to the team. Ever since I heard that they were taking code cruft seriously (http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-01-09-unused.html), I've had high hopes for LibreOffice.
Maakuth · 2012-05-31
Most of the community developers have jumped the bandwagon to work with LibreOffice. It seems that the developers still with OpenOffice.org are mostly working for IBM and Oracle. The project just did the first release (http://www.openoffice.org/news/aoo34.html) after two years of silence, but there's still a lot to do before they are featurewise competing with LibreOffice. You can see a feature comparison here: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-04-26-ooo-comparison.html
sciurus · 2011-06-01
GNOME and LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks' summary:
"Apparently this is a somewhat divisive attempt by an exiting Oracle, along with IBM to sideline the existing developer community, their governance, their aspirations, membership, licensing choice (explicitly adapted to meet IBM's needs incidentally), bylaws, and so on. All of this despite a profound, frequently stated open-ness to including new (particularly large) corporate contributors inside TDF, and taking their advice seriously."
http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2011-06-01.html
bergie · 2011-02-10
Oracle's lawsuit on Android apparently tries to claim that API design can be copyrighted: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2010-10-29-api-copyright.html
mmavnn · 2010-11-02
Meeks doesn't work for Oracle (he worked for Novell, last time I checked). I suspect this is also true of most of the other people on the list.
Edit: still Novell, Michael's blog is at http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/
jaen · 2010-10-26
That's one side of the story... the other side is that OpenOffice was stagnating, in terms of commits and added developers, the current developers were not happy with how the community was managed by Sun/Oracle, and eventually decided to take matters into their own hands.
Historical data: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008.html
buovjaga · 2016-01-24
More:
https://www.gnome.org//~michael/blog/2014-01-30-under-the-hood.html
https://www.gnome.org//~michael/blog/2014-07-29-under-the-hood-4-3.htm…
https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-01-29-under-the-hood-4-4.h…
https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under-the-hood-5-0.h…
Keep an eye on 5.1 as well :) https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan/5.1