Re: Shawn Gordon answers all the questions :)

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Re: Shawn Gordon answers all the questions :)
by Shawn Gordon on Friday 31/Aug/2001, @10:38

WRT to Quanta. It is being rewritten, and the two developers are on our staff and are the full license holders.

I'm on the koffice devel lists too, and there is work going on, this is true, but when you are doing something in your spare time, it is usually done in fits and starts for as long as it interests you. I don't want to bad mouth KOffice, because I have nothing bad to say, but I have watched this over the last couple of years and the cycles are pretty easy to predict now.

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Re: Shawn Gordon answers all the questions :)
by vk on Friday 31/Aug/2001, @12:20

If you think that KOffice will never catch up, then why so much work is going behind KOffice? If KOffice can't catch up Hancom office, then how can it catch up MSOffice ever? Why anyone will ever switch to KOffice? If KOffice can't get ground then what is the point on developing it further or goal of KOfice is to just provide a alternate inferior office suites? It's better to be involved in a propritary project like hancomoffice than doing hardwork in vain.
I don't think it is because any one wants a free office suite. There are already free office suites more mature than KOffice.

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Re: Shawn Gordon answers all the questions :)
by Shawn Gordon on Sunday 02/Sep/2001, @09:27

I didn't really express myself well on this point. I've been swamped since the show and I've done my best to keep up on these talkbacks, but I haven't always had the time to articulate things properly.

KOffice is an impressive piece of work for what it is. The sad truth is that there are just hardly any programmers working on it at the moment, and I don't know if that is likely to change any time soon. When you are working on a project in your spare time because you find it fun or interesting, you will probably stop working on it when it ceases to be fun or interesting so work proceeds in fits and starts. Given this kind of development model it would be very hard for KOffice to reach the same level of functionality as any commercial suite. The upside however is that it isn't likely to end up with a lot of bloat and meaningless features to try and justify upgrades.

I say these things with all respect and support for KDE and KOffice, and it is very likely that the feature set in KOffice currently will satisfy a good number of users, but not likely to satisfy power users at this stage (you wouldn't believe the things I've seen people do with a spreadsheet).

Hopefully that is a better explanation

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Re: Shawn Gordon answers all the questions :)
by Aaron J. Seigo on Friday 31/Aug/2001, @12:33

the past is only an indicator of the future when conditions are similar. in its early days koffice had the extreme disadvantage of working against a fluctuating, unstable set of libraries whose user base was small. side effects of this included fewer developers available, more work required just to keep up with the libraries, core KDE developers were concentrating on the core (surprise) ... and i'm sure there are others. look what happens when even just one of the core developers jumps on an application in the case of David Faure and KWord.

don't bank on KOffice not making it out of the shoots as a serious suite; instead i would plan on competing with them on the KDE desktop, much as Hancom will with Open/Star Office. though that one is even trickier IMO: more mature, corporate backing, multiplatform, existing user base.

hrm, here's a question for you Shawn: assuming Open/Star Office manages to trim their binary size down to not be a huge whale of a suite, what would you site as the advantages of Hancom vs Star Office?

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Re: Shawn Gordon answers all the questions :)
by Carg on Friday 31/Aug/2001, @18:40

Easy to predict, hum? Well, people like you predicted that since Linux was developed in people's spare time it wouldn't go far and now look at it... Same goes for the KDE project.

It's funny how after you "contributed" to KOffice you now say "let's be realistic". What makes you think that Hancom can beat it? That it can beat Microsoft?

If you think it's the simple fact it's not free software than you should forget about it. Much larger and more complex software (go write a kernel, a C library and a C compiler) than an office suite has been developed and so will KOffice.

In the meantime the community can use OpenOffice.

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Re: Shawn Gordon answers all the questions :)
by Matt on Saturday 01/Sep/2001, @00:40

I agree, but I'll use Koffice instead, I tried it an I love it. I don't think enough people used it until now to allow for the very fast bug fixing/development that goes on in KDE.

I can't believe it was only 9Mb...

Many thanks,

Matt

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