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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Community building - Sprint recap
From:       Cyrille Berger <cberger () cberger ! net>
Date:       2008-11-28 18:37:39
Message-ID: 200811281937.39408.cberger () cberger ! net
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On Friday 28 November 2008, Andrew wrote:
> Personal opinion.. please forgive any ignorance in the following comment -
> I'm new here and its not my intention to offend or start an argument.
Don't worry, new eyes always provides new perspectives on a discution ;)

> A sexy project is not just one that has the right bells and whistles. 
> There is significant appeal in working on a project that people will
> actually use. To an outsider (me) Koffice has a few (related) problems in
> this regard:
>
> 1. It has a lot of sub-projects (not bad in itself but makes 2 harder)
> 2. It has not achieved a usable degree of stability and reliability (in my
> experience)
> 3. It has relatively few users (at least of kword, kspread, kpresenter
> where OOo alternatives are reasonably reliable)
>
> Because it is rare for me to "enjoy" using office apps (means I am doing
> dull work) I am very hostile to an office app that crashes or has
> incompatibilities (as this extends my time doing dull work).  An office app
> becomes "sexy" (if we must call it that) when it works simply and reliably.
>   Has worked for abiword.

Well yes, but we are back in the vicious circle of the chicken-egg problem, we 
need developers to finish koffice, yet developers will only come if koffice 
is finished. Basically we need to break the circle. While stability is (one 
thing) that is "sexy" for users, it's not necesseraly important for a 
developer.

The first thing is to make koffice "sexy", attractive for new developers. A 
strong user base is one thing, but we won't get that now. So we have to think 
what else is going to make KOffice sexy for developers, and to present those 
things to potential developers. Then we just have to apply the 8-points 
mentioned in Alexandra's mail.

-- 
Cyrille Berger
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