KOffice: a big promise

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KOffice: a big promise
by devians on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @02:52

Since I met with KOffice at first, it has been a big promise for me. It seemed very attractive but I found difficulties if I wanted to use that for real tasks: bugs and lack of fetures.
I would note, that the imperfect solution of an otherwise very minor thing can prevent the normal usage of a complex object. For example: if the seat in a car is not fixed properly to its base, its swing totally destroys your enjoy of an otherwise good car. And that are only a few screws.
My experience with Kword and Kspread is disturbing. I like them, but mostly I cannot use them (OOp is the opposite: I can use, however, I avoid if possible). Both have long buglists (with 2-4-years-old bugs as well). It seems the lack of a solid developer group prevents them to be real hitting applications.
Anyhow, it's not a news. The history of Koffice is full of complains about the very few developers. I don't know the reason, KDE attracts developers quite well, while KOffice not at all. Perhaps this is the most important point to be changed concerning KOffice.
I wish a nicer future to KOffice.

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Re: KOffice: a big promise
by Boudewijn Rempt on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @04:30

The main problem with developing an office suite as a volunteer effort, as opposed to either buying existing source and opening that up (OO) or buying developers (MS-Office), is that many developers hardly use office software to any great extent. It's not that often that I have to write something that needs a word processor; all design documents at our company are docbook, for instance. If I use a spreadsheet it's for making simple lists. Emacs does that, too. I never use a database, I never generate reports. I seldom have to do a presentation, but from the big four apps, presentation software is what I use most often. When I seldom have a need for a word processor, spreadsheet or presentation app, I don't feel the need to hack on those.

But KOffice also has a diagrammer, a vector paint app and a paint app. I need a diagrammer really often. I use Kivio almost daily for my work, and Krita and Karbon are apps I use for fun -- and while I started working on Krita, I'm currently touching Kivio and Karbon, too. And I don't need to hack on KPresenter, because that app already does everything _I_ want from it.

As for features: KOffice not only has relatively few developers, the developers that do work on KOffice have had to spend a whole lot of time on something that's not visible as features or bug fixes, namely moving to the Oasis file format.

However, judging by activity on koffice-devel, there's active development on many KOffice compenents again. What's still sorely missing is someone who really wants to get their hands dirty on KWord. And it's such a nice, interesting application... An editor on steroids, and which developer doesn't want to work on an editor?

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Re: KOffice: a big promise
by devians on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @06:20

You might probably right concerning the developer's attitude. I would likely accept it if I didn't see the OOo case. There is an active community around OOo. They somehow organize themself and provided a significant and continous improvement of OOo.
I have the feeling if KOffice had the same human resource it would be light years ahead.
The question remains: what does OOo do better and how ?

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Re: KOffice: a big promise
by Boudewijn Rempt on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @06:26

They have a lot of paid, full-time developers to do the less interesting work.

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Re: KOffice: a big promise
by JohnFlux on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @11:20

Last I checked, there was a total of 8 outside developers that have ever done anything at all meaningful to openoffice. It's almost all done internally.

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