Linux Development Call To Arms

Hell O'World writes "This ZDNet Article points to the direction that Linux developers need to follow. Many people think that Linux needs an Office clone to gain acceptance, but the truth is that monolithic software is not the future. To get all of the functionality that anyone could possibly need in one place, the Office paradigm is to have everything there at once, and that takes a huge amount of resources to load, and years to learn. Linux will not gain converts by giving users the same thing, that they will then have to relearn. The power of UNIX is in connecting small, fleet-footed tools. What we need now is to create an environment, where users can easily create customized tools for the way they work, and developers can easily add new functionality."

Comments

Office is not a big monolithic blob

[dan the person]

FOr years and years, MS have been made it up from small reusable components. Need to display a graph in Word? Well, word doesn't have spreadsheet program built in, it embeds an Excel component.

Need a graph, well it embeds MS graph. Need an organisation chart? Well there's a seperate reusable component for that.

This is like OpenDoc

[uglyhead69]

Essentially Apple's OpenDoc was the same paradigm. Unfortunately due to business concerns OpenDoc was canned. The tools that were released were VERY useful though. For the short time it was around a was a great way to get work done. With the addition of the power in unix, this paradigm could be very powerful.

OpenDoc, NextStep -- GNUStep?

[Blitter]

As others have mentioned, the failed OpenDoc initiative was very much in this vein. NextStep (the "new" Apple initiative, now renamed Cocoa) has long had a reputation of allowing one to quickly string together custom applications from preexisting object classes, making it very popular in businesses that custom made in house applications. It is also worth noting that this framework allows for what are called "Services". Applications can "export" functionality to other applications. So for example you can hilite text in a text editor, then go to the mail services submenu in the system menu and from there tell the mail program to open a new message window with the hilighted item pasted inside. This also enables generalized filters, etc, in some ways like Unix shell pipes.

Of course, it's not open source, but what is GNUStep doing these days?