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KOffice 1.5 Released
ingwa writes to tell us that the KOffice team has released version 1.5 which offers, among other things, default OpenDocument file format, new project planning tool KPlato, professional color support and adjustment layers in Krita and the long awaited Kexi 1.0. From the announcement: "KOffice was the first office suite that announced support for OpenDocument and now the second to announce it as the default file format after OpenOffice.org. This makes KOffice a member of a very select group and will lead to new deployment opportunities. Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that also use OpenDocument."
This is great news. More choices is always better. This might even convince a few people to use KOffice as their Office Suite of choice, as it is native to KDE, and it'll be easier than ever to share documents with others.
As long as they keep giving their software stupid names by sticking a "k" or a "g" on the front of it this software will never appeal to anyone but the Linux zealots (a.k.a. "Power" users).
As long as they keep giving their software stupid names by sticking a "microsoft" or a "i" on the front of it this software will never appeal to anyone but the Windows and Mac OS zealots (a.k.a. "Least Common Denominator" users).
And you're right, it won't ever happen. Because some people will want some killer feature only KOffice has, and some people will want some feature only OpenOffice has.
Unity? Pah. The whole point of open source is that unity is neither necessary nor (typically) desirable. If you CAN use the same stuff in ANYTHING, ON anything, WHY would you want to use it in only ONE thing?
The problem with your idea is that it makes sense.
Congrats on the release, but I have to say that OO.o still is the leader in OSS office suites.
Well, as long as they're properly compatible - pick the one that suits your personal preference. Or even the right tool for the right task, if one does something well that the other doesn't (or not at all). I'm perfectly happy that Firefox is more popular than Opera (my preference), because if you've built a site to work in one it's 99% sure to work in the other.
If we see competition on features rather than on format and compatibility, nothing is better than that in my opinion. If it isn't clear what I mean by that, let's for the moment assume that one of them offered regex search & replace, and the other did not. The results, before and after are both valid ODF documents - the difference is how you get there. Same with layout, which offers good layout management? Spell check and grammar?
Besides, I think the only way to have a format implemented according to spec is to have at least two implementations. They're sure to run into many of the other's bugs resulting in better standards compliance to benefit all. In short, I don't care if OpenOffice is "leading", I think "local competition" is just as excellent as motivator as the big competition against MS Office.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well, to be completely honest, OpenOffice is also developed by a very large software company: Sun Microsystems.
They have many full-time programmers working on it (about 40-50, if I'm not mistaken) and they are doing most of the work.
Sure, openness is good and we have many really cool things as a result of this -- see KDE integration for a very important example -- but Oo.org is hardly the shining example of hobbyists coming together to build a great product.
Actually, KOffice is a far better example for this.
People are a bit confused about this "KOffice is only KDE" business.
A modern office suite needs to build on top of a really solid foundation in terms of widgets and supporting library.
OpenOffice (and StarOffice before it) chose to design everything from scratch. Every menu, every window, every pixel is hand-drawn by the program itself. They have a very powerful toolkit in VCL which DUPLICATES all that a toolkit should do. They coded all their dialogs from scratch, font handling from scratch, print support from scratch. Skins and themes - from scratch.
Basically, OpenOffice folks wrote half an operating system to make their office suite. Mozilla did something very similar. And then people wonder where the bloat is coming from!
There is another way to write applications. You look around, and see that there is a very very powerful library foundations out there. You get menus for free. Dialogs. Font handling. Network transparency. Buttons. Canvas. Printing. Image input/output. Sound. This set of libraries is called KDE, although you could use GNOME to a similar extent.
Why on Earth should KOffice people reinvent the wheel yet another time, when there is a very powerful library that does all of this already?
If you download OpenOffice.org, in its 300 MB, you download a whole toolkit plus half an operating system in bloat.
If you download KOffice, just download kdelibs while you're at it. You don't need the rest of KDE! Just look at it as another library providing functionality.
We shouldn't go back in time and recode each menu pixel-for-pixel in every single application. StarOffice did this out of legacy reasons and now we're stuck with it. But in this day and age, people use libraries which take care of this stuff, so you can concentrate on functionality.
If you use similar programs, why don't you make suggestions on what you would expect them to have? I'm sure the KPlato team would love to hear what actual users would like their program to do. You do have a say. If you need more or more flexible functionality, try to explain to the team what you want. Innovation is not generated in a vacuum. Necessity is the mother of invention. In the cases where the one feeling the need and the one having the tools to fulfill it are different people, then they need to communicate otherwise the need will never be fulfilled.
(a.k.a where's the patch?)
OpenOffice inherited a lot of this bloat from its predecessor, StarOffice.
Also, a more appropriate comparison is that the OpenOffice codebase includes a subset of the KDE functionality. This "bloat", written to be cross-platform from the outset, is why OpenOffice works on Microsoft Windows now, and KOffice does not.