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KOffice Team: A Handful of Coders, a Lot of Code
nickbrown writes: "In this interview with the KOffice development team it is revealed that only about 4-6 people are working on the suite of applications. It would appear they lack the resources to keep up with the likes of openoffice.
Worth a read as it highlights the troubles they are having trying to produce a truly productive office suite for KDE."
...open source tactics.
I mean, like, really.
Why don't open source coders collaborate more? Why in the hell do we need a half dozen different office suites?? Give me one good implementation, and that's all I'll ever use. Is it just that getting geeks to cooperate is like trying to get a group of 3 yr olds (or cats) to all go in the same direction -- near to impossible??
This is the real way open source works. Everyone cries and screams about open source, but when the rubber hits the road only a couple of people do a decent job and do the actual work, while the rest of the people just rave on about how l33t an open source coder they are. Most programmers expound open source... then try and figure out ways to sneak the code into their own stuff to make money.
Here we go again. I am once again going to mention something that NO ONE seems to understand is IMPORTANT in a wordprocessor. CITATIONS and REFERENCE HANDLING.
There is NOTHING that really separates one of these wordprocessors (abiword, kword, openoffice/staroffice) from one another. They ALL do the same sorts of things in the same ways...but not a one of them has something a real professional writer REQUIRES. None of them has what ALL college students (and many highschool kids) REQUIRES: an ability to handle citations and build reference pages.
Word and Wordperfect have this on Macs and Windoze via third party apps like EndNote, because the processors were designed so apps like EndNote could seamlessly become part of the wordprocessor (for all practical purposes). Endnote adds its own menubar entry so you can insert citations into your text as you go and then it AUTOMATICALLY generates correctly formatted reference page(s) based on user selection.
There is one and ONLY one "wordprocessor" app in linux/unix that can handle this well and that is Lyx. Lyx is IT. The ONLY show in town for any student or professional writer who needs to cite references in their writings. This is ALL scientists and ALL college students and anyone else who wants/needs to write serious research papers. You MUST cite references or your paper is unfounded heresay, yet NO wordprocessor project is even TRYING to add this capability to their app.
Obviously, none of the projects is interested in any professional writers. Their targets would appear to be letter writers and writers of any work that needs no support (fiction). This is fine, such as it is, but no one gets through this life without having to write SOME papers that require citations and reference pages damnit! If you actually have managed to avoid this then your degree must be astrology or basket weaving.
Someone on ANY of these projects: OpenOffice, Abiword, Koffice...provide either a pipe (like Lyx uses to communicate with the most excellent Pybliographic) so third party apps can work seamlessly with your wordprocessors and insert citation markers and handle reference page generation OR add this capability directly into your wordprocessors! Hell, OpenOffice/StarOffice is PARTWAY there but they dropped the ball BIGTIME. OpenOffice/StarOffice actually has what it calls a bibliography database but it is totally useless. All it will do is store whatever you enter into it MANUALLY. Then, it wont use this database to allow you to insert references/citations into a document, no, it just holds the information uselessly. Go that ONE extra step and make the bibliography database USEFUL: it should be able to import and export all the major citation formats (bibtex, refer, pubmed) and there should a menu item in the wordprocessor that talks directly to this database and will allow the writer to insert citations. At the end, you should be able to hit a "create reference page(s)" button and have staroffice/openoffice add a formatted set of reference pages to the ass-end of the finished document just like Endnote plus Word or Wordperfect will!
I mean, c'mon! Quit focusing on toy writing and add something that hardcore researchers and all college students require. If Lyx can do it, so can the more user-friendly wordprocessors like Kword, Abiword, OpenOffice, etc.
Because of this fatal failing in ALL available linux WYSIWYG wordprocessors, I have to keep Lyx around so I can do my real writing, leaving the rare note or letter to Kword or OpenOffice. What a waste. A nice, BIG app that is kept around just for simplistic writing. Lyx is OK but damnit, I want and need to write, not learn a programming language (latex). My job is to do biological research, not learn programming or hundreds of obscure latex commands just to publish. Lyx and I get by but there needs to be more options for the research paper writer/college student/scientist.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Koffice is pretty damn good as is... but unfortunately, there are some major insufficiencies: notably, filter support. I think most people who have actually tried using staroffice/openoffice would agree that there is a lot of unnecessary bloat. Another problem, for KDE-zealots like myself, is that other office suites don't integrate well into the slick, advanced, well supported, and popular KDE.
It just seems that with all the different projects out there that are supported by thousands of developers... there are only a few people for each that actually use the program. However, I see K-Office getting a lot more usage. It just seems that you get a LOT more *useful* code by improving k-office than by improving xyz-random project on Freshmeat. (my 2 cents)
The article says:
When you get down to it, an office product is really just a collection of different objects that have defined rules for interacting with eachother. You don't have to read all 350,000 lines of code to find a starting point for a new module.It takes a very long time just to reverse engineer other file formats and build filters.
The article confirms your point on the filters. They mention the filters as the one area where they need the most help. It would be nice to live in the ideal world where the producers of file formats create cleaner documentation, or provide industry standard filters for their formats that you can integrate in a product. Unfortunately, the temptation is to use poorly documented, proprietary formats to create a monopoly position in the market.
I didn't say small groups can handle all projects, just that they can do some things very well. I would agree with the article that filters are a rough edge.
The article incorrectly stated that Aethera was not being worked on, and that the last beta was in april of 2001; in fact, there have been at least two betas that I know of, just in 2002. And Kivio is not only being worked on but is supported under windows as well, in the commercial version.