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Am I alone in thinking that the right solution to the OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice mess (by which I mean the software itself) is to start all over again?

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in theory yes, but in practice no. developing such a complex piece of software is very hard to do. the pieces are there, they just need refine it.

Indeed. Which is why the lion's share was done by corporations Star Division and then Sun, not by "the community".

Joel disagrees: rewriting stuff from scratch is often a very bad idea http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

The key word is "often". OpenOffice needs it's own "Firefox moment".

Fortunately, Joel is not the first or last word on any subject.

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