Hi William,
William W. Austin wrote:
I have been asked by management at the office whether there is a
planned/announced/intended/etc. release date for 2.0.
Hopefully it should be out in less than a month.
While I think it to be a tad presumpious to ask about such for free
software, I understand as that's the way many companies think.
Oh, no, it's fine. Not presumptious at all. A lot of open source
projects have planned release dates.
But companies should understand what happens if we reach the date and
the product isn't ready. This is something that happens in both
propietary and open source projects. And it's good to know how each one
deals with the problem:
1) Propietary software will usually ship anyways, and give you a broken
product.
2) Open source software will usually push back the release date.
So, it's a trade-off. With propietary software, you are more confident
of the release date, but not the quality. With open source, you are more
confident of the quality, but less of the release date.
Now, some projects like Gnome and Ubuntu do have a perfectly rigid
release cycle. For example, Gnome's is 6 months. But the reason why they
can do that is because these projects have many independent packages.
So, when the release time comes, they simply pick the packages that they
know work well to make the release. So, with Gnome and Ubuntu you can be
confident of both the quality and the release date. But you can't know
for sure which packages will make it to the release.
For example, the most recent release of Unbuntu was expected to come
with OpenOffice.org 2.0. But OOo 2.0 was delayed, so they had to ship
version 1.1.4 instead.
Also,
one of the managers who asked me said he belived that StarOffice8 had
announced a planned release in July or August. While I don't know
whether this is accurate - the man is honest but could be mistaken -
he's asking me to find out, so I have to ask...
I think think that's been the plan. But this may have to be pushed back
a month or so. For StarOffice8 I would guess August-September.
Sorry. :-/
Nothing to be sorry about :-)
Cheers,
Daniel.
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