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KOffice
by Paul Vandenberg on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @05:33

I definitely think there is value in having KOffice. I like the look, speed and light feel of it. I don't trust Sun Microsystems and think it is good having multiple office programs. I don't think the open source community should put all its eggs in the OOo basket. I think it would be good if Abiword and Gnumeric also went to the OASIS format.

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Re: KOffice
by Boudewijn Rempt on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @08:00

I sometimes wonder whether OpenOffice isn't more a poison pill than a gift to the free software world. For starters, it has had an undeniable impact on the development of KOffice and Gnome office, and a detrimental one, I think. For many, it's as if the availability of OpenOffice made it seem as if it were futile for them to do their own thing.

Then again, more and more of OpenOffice is written in Java. And not a kind of Java that can ever be compatible with free java compilers, interpreters or class libraries because com.sun.* classes are used liberally.

Moreover, OpenOffice is nearly impossible to build, not just for mere mortals like me, but it appears that the only builds of OpenOffice 2.0 beta's are coming from the old StarOffice headquarters in Hamburg where they apparently have squirreled away the only one who knows how to build everything into one package.

And finally, OpenOffice isn't all that good, actually. Not if you download it from OpenOffice.org. I must admit that SuSE has done a great job of packaging OpenOffice, but when you take a vanilla OpenOffice, no matter whether for Linux or for KDE, it'll be barely usable. In the space of one week, I've had it crash on old .sdw files, completely mess up the layout of a very simple document merely by converting it to Word and back a few times and lose all track of its paragraph styles.

KOffice has its problems -- bugs, unimplemented features, code duplication (working on that, though, soon Kivio, Karbon and Krita will use the same docker implementation, and I feel the urge to make sure they use the same colour and layer docker tabs are used in all three, too.) -- but it can be built, and built using nothing but free software, too.

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Re: KOffice
by Michael Thaler on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @13:00

It is also a pitty that Sun does not release the Lighthouse Office suite as open source. The Lighthouse office suite was a very good office suite for NextStep and it could be used with GnuStep. I think the reason for Sun not releasing Lighthouse is, that they want people to use OpenOffice or StarOffice.

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Re: KOffice
by Boudewijn Rempt on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @13:20

Hadn't they already put Lighthouse in statis before StarOffice came into the picture? I know that I quite often check GNUStep out -- there's the rudiments of a very flexible paint app, BluTulip for GNUStep, and I'd like to see Lighthouse in real life, too.

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Re: KOffice
by Rodro on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @10:12

OOo is written in C++.

*Some* features, such as the DB component and reports require java.

But you can make extensions in Java, Python, Javascript and StarBasic.

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Re: KOffice
by Boudewijn Rempt on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @10:32

And amount of Java code is increasing. It's irrelevant that you can extend StarOffice in whichever language, the basic set requires Java, and the people who used Java were evil enough to use internal sun classes, giving up the hope of ever truly freeing OpenOffice.

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Re: KOffice
by Sven Langkamp on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @12:08

The one thing I miss is a filter collection which does not depend on KOffice or OpenOffice. It's a large duplication of code and a waste of developer resources that every application which uses the OASIS format has to develop it's own filters.

Imagine KOffice, OpenOffice and maybe later also Abiword/Gnumeric would use the same filters. As a result there would be much better filters for all.

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Re: KOffice
by David Faure on Friday 08/Oct/2004, @02:13

This is what we had in mind when we (Werner and I) started libwv2 on sourceforge. The goal was to share (at least with Abiword) a common Word-import filter. However the abiword developers (who wrote libwv1, and who we expected to join the libwv2 effort) never joined, so libwv2 is still used by KWord only and is unfinished...

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