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

Bundled/monolithic software

[syates21]

Microsoft killed all other word processor/spreadsheet vendors by having a more integrated package.

What makes anyone think people don't want bundled software?

Plus what he's talking about has already been done. Office is basically a consistently skinned collection of COM controls.

Re:Bundled/monolithic software

[_Quinn]

It's not /bundled/ software, it's software /that works well together/. Traditionally, the only route to integration was a single (or a few very tightly coupled) binaries. Now there's COM, which MS wrote basically because it was painful to make the office apps work together without it. However, the end-user can't choose what parts of office not to install (changing, with the `don't install until used option'), but certainly don't have the ability to to replace a crappy component that MS supplies with a better one from elsewhere.

The problem is more general than office software, though; the tendency in interfaces with GUIs has been to add complexity to the application and make it nearly impossible to use one part of it over another. KDE and GNOME's object models are working to address this; in fact, KOffice is (or shortly will be) `a skinned collection of KParts'. However, it's still hard -- and requires special tools -- to stitch these components together. There's no GUI equivalent to the command-line pipe/redirect paradigm, except for (rarely) in RAD tools for a specific toolkit/OE (e.g. QtBuilder(?), KDevelop); but these don't really function on the user level.

The most important part is that Linux has succeeded, until now, in replacing UNIX systems, because the cost of migration, especially in skills and time, is low (Linux is-a UNIX, runs basically all your standard UNIX tools, runs on commodity on NT-obsolete boxes, etc). The same is NOT true for migrating desktop boxes; I would argue a substantially lower TCO, but to make people /want/ to switch, you have to do _better_ than MS, not just match it/them (as worked for UNIX, except in price :))

-_Quinn

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I don't think so

[elmegil]

What we need now is to create an environment, where users can easily create customized tools for the way they work

No. Not any more than we need to create an environment where users can easily create customized furniture, cars, or whatnot. The mass users you need to attract to make Linux *really* popular want these things built for them and delivered to them--they are not do-it-yourselfers like most of us who read Slashdot are. That is why, despite all their bugs, Microsoft continues to sell.