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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: KOffice and StarOffice
From:       Waldo Bastian <bastian () kde ! org>
Date:       2000-07-21 19:59:08
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On Fri, 21 Jul 2000, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Hi there.
>
> I write a column for ZDNet on Linux issues, and this week I'm writing
> about the GPLing of StarOffice.
>
> I would like to find out, from any of the KOffice team, what effect this
> announcement (if any) has on KOffice. Are there any components of
> StarOffice that you would like to intergate into KOffice in the short
> term?

In the early days of KDE a lot of KDE application started as KDE versions of 
existing X applications. At that time that was a very effective way to 
improve those applications a lot in a short time. Over time however, a lot of 
these applications have proven to be almost unmaintainable. They weren't as 
nicely OO structured as the rest of KDE. Rewriting such an application from 
scratch results in much better and maintable code. And to add some 
perspective, our own HTML widget has been rewritten about 4 times over the 
last 2 year (and that wasn't that bad to begin with). So the message that I 
learned is that reusing actual code is hardly interesting: it either holds 
you down or you rewrite it within 6 months anyway. 

What might be interesting is to see how the filters are done. Good 
specifications of the various document formats are still hard to come by and 
having another implementation to look at can be very usefull.

I'm very happy with StarOffice becoming GPL for a completely other reason 
though. With a major cross-platform office suite under the GPL, there is an 
opportunity to create a truly open document format that is actually well 
supported. I think that that is currently one of the biggest problems on the 
desktop. If we had a widely accepted, well-defined standard for office 
documents it would be much easier for a lot of people to choose a platform 
based on quality instead of being forced to use a platform because of a 
decission they made 5 years ago.

> Furthermore, does Sun's intention to build StarOffice components using
> Bonobo rather than KParts affect its usability within KOffice? 

It seems like that has been mostly a decission from Sun management and not 
from Sun engineers. My guess is that Sun expects to be able to be a more 
important player within GNOME than within KDE, given that GNOME doesn't have 
an office suite and that with KDE they would have to compete much more with 
KOffice. We have seen the same with Eazel, they wouldn't be able to play the 
role they are playing now within GNOME in KDE because our file manager is 
already so good that it's very hard to make a business around improving it.

> Does it at all effect the balance between KDE and GNOME?

The balance between KDE and GNOME is determined by the developers and users 
we manage to attract. I don't think open source developers are standing in 
line to work on Star Office. Users are interested in things that they 
actually can use, so untill there are some actual applications that they can 
use I don't expect much change there. We are all currently working very hard 
to make the first release of KOffice a success and when people have used that 
they don't want to go back to StarOffice any longer ;-)

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
Make way, KDE/Linux is coming to a desktop near you!

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