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Re: Star Office (was: opensource in Israel)



On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 02:07:47PM +0300, Herouth Maoz wrote:
> To put it another way, are we evangelizing for code which is trustworthy and 
> which you can fix yourself etc., or are we evangelizing against code 
> associated with mega-companies?

OpenOffice isn't "evil" from being associated with Sun. Yet, as a
developer, I'd rather mess with KWord's or AbiWord's code since:

1. I'd like to avoid bureaucracy, obviously present when contributing
to a project led by a huge corporation. You'll depend on few code
reviews (not necessarily bad) and their execs for deciding what should
go in.

2. I won't get the same community feeling I'd get with the KDE people.
Sun's people are paid employees who probably forget all about the
project as soon as they leave work -- not the community type of people;
You not going to swap jokes with them on IRC :)

3. They don't base themselves on existing toolkits and technologies but
rewrite it all on the Linux platform. For getting a product release out
of the doors on time - it might work, but it will feature minimal
integration with the desktop and would be a bloat (Windows' OpenOffice
build is 30MB, Linux OpenOffice is 60MB). They rewrite the XML parser
(libxml?), the GUI toolkit (VCL, though there are talks about making
the VCL widgets later wrap around GTK+ ones), the Object Embedding
system (UNO instead of CORBA). Their own replacements might provide
features superior to the existing solutions, but the "community" way
would be to push improvements into existing projects.

To improve KWord, I won't have to download the source to Qt or KDE, and
I could use my existing experience with those toolkits.

You can see exactly the same issues with Mozilla, and I believe that's
the reason it caught up non-Netscape developers so slowly.

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