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Koffice 1.3 Released
perbert writes "On January 27th, the KDE Project released KOffice 1.3 for Linux and Unix operating systems. KOffice is a free set of office applications that integrate with the award winning KDE desktop. KOffice is a light-weight yet feature rich office solution and provides a variety of filters to interoperate with other popular office suites such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office."
Let's see, OpenOffice, Textmaker, Microsoft Office, KOffice, Kingsoft... what else? It seems that there are now more office choices for Linux than for Windows. Fortunately all except Microsoft Office seem to be moving towards the StarOffice XML format so we can have one file format that works on all of them.
My understanding is that it's not so much the file parsing that's difficult, it's fitting the resulting data into your application's object model. The KOffice people may have a good understand of the Office format, but it may not be a perfect fit onto their internal data structures.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Perhaps reading the files themselves isn't as hard as mapping them onto your own representation of a document. OpenOffice seems to have been reasonably like Office from the time I first saw it around '99 I believe (as StarOffice). KDE is effectively a design from scratch, although various things come out working similarly, because they are reasonable design decisions. As a consequence, even though the open world knows the data format of Word files to a large extent, reading them into KOffice is still hard.
This wild guess bought to you by not_cub.
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Also, KWord is built on top of KDE's component/toolkit architecture that is a world apart from MacOS X Carbon/Cocoa API. While Qt allows a native port to Aqua, it does not offer a native port to Carbon or Coca, and Apple is unlikely to establish a third desktop API on its platform just for the sake of getting a functionally rather limited word processor that, at the moment, has no dramatic advantage over the old Claris/AppleWorks offering.
And keep in mind that for Safari, Apple just used the engine (KHTML) of a free program, not the GUI application (konqueror) itself, in the same way it put its own (proprietary) GUI on top of Mach and BSD. From I experience, I doubt that KWord and Abiword are, in their present state, as attractive as "engines" as BSD and KHTML were. If it all, Abiword seems a more likely candidate since it's designed as a cross-plattform application and, quite in opposition to KWord, focuses on getting base functions and usability right before acquiring more nifty/hackerish features such as frame-based page layout and importing PDF files.
What makes your scenario very unlikely in the end are licensing issues. KOffice and Abiword are GPLed code and thus would require Apple to release any program based on them under the GPL. Which doesn't fit to the company's successful tactics of putting slick, but proprietary GUIs on top BSD- or LPGL-licensed hacker code like BSD and KHTML. A GPLed "iWord" that could be ported back to Linux and even Windows would, unlike the current i-apps, be no exclusive selling point for MacOS X.
-F
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Since KOffice is GPL, they would be forced to open the source code to their entire application. It couldn't be where they take the LGPL KHTML and link things to it
I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.
Now, assuming you are not the CEO of the company, why exactly is this a desireable situation again? The above seems like an unequivocally bad deal for the community of developers, and I say, thank goodness the GPL prevents such shenanigans.
since QT is GPL'd... commercial QT applications must pay for a license
If people want to profit from code based on the excellent Qt toolkit, why should they not have to pay Trolltech for the privelige of using their excellent toolkit? TT is gracious enough to allow free (beer and speech) usage of Qt for noncommercial uses, and their commercial license fees are by most accounts very reasonable. It isn't as if they are starved for customers.
You don't have to buy a license for even MS application development
What the hell are you talking about? Assuming you aren't referring to illegal MS application development, can you please explain this? How do you obtain the MS API, core libraries, and development environment without buying a license to use at least soem flavor of Windows, and probably VB, or another MS-compatible IDE as well?
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
One important thing that OOo has and that KOffice will probably never have is the chance to use essentially the same app across different platforms (Win32, Linux, SunOS, etc). It's sort of like Konqueror vs. Mozilla.