On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 21:09 -0600, Randomthots wrote: > > On the one hand it's not "set in stone" in the sense that there's room > > for maneuver, but within reason. Customer demand is only one factor. We > > also have to consider the reality of limited resources and technological > > trade-offs (e.g. bloat). > > No different than any proprietary app in that respect.
The difference is that for those that volunteer, their efforts being voluntary might simply be personal preference, where their expertise lies and nothing to do with customer demand whereas the effort but into most proprietary products is centrally determined. There are advantages and disadvantages to both these scenarios. IN the case of OOo Sun put in most of the engineering effort so to an extent at least, he who pays the piper calls the tune. > Myth: OpenOffice.org is the product of an army of volunteer hackers > working in their basements in their spare time, and all they seek in > recompense is a warm, fuzzy, feeling and the gratitude of the users. > > Poppycock! Its actually a combination. There are engineering contributions from other sources. Google just cam on board, Novell make contributions and there are some individuals like Pavel Janik and Kevin Hendricks. In addition some notice is taken of the whole community view through issuezilla and the lists - BAse is a good example of a major application resulting from this. > In fact, I recall more than one discussion > about how hard it was for volunteer hacker-bees to actually get code > accepted. That is true but it doesn't mean they don't exist. Its an over-simplification thinking in terms of indificual hacker, think also large companies, but again they are likely to contribute where they think there is a need, not necessarily where you think there is. > Not in this case. As was pointed out in another thread, increasing the > user base is critical to the success of OOo overall. The success of OOo > is one component (how critical I have no idea) in the overall corporate > strategy of Sun of unseat the Microsoft hegemony. So A -> B, B -> C, > therefore A -> C. If you think Sun is so influential, why not lobby them for features in Star Office. They would then probably implement them in OOo > I'm perfectly OK with the practical arguments vis-a-vis resources, etc. > But I also think that a practical argument can be made FOR inclusion of > an Outlook component -- or as Chad suggests, better integration and > collaboration with the Mozilla product line. I think optimising the code for efficiency is the number one priority. These are opinions. The Outlook thing has been gone over Ad nauseam. Since Ximian Evolution is being ported to Windows it would make a lot more sense to wait until its available and adapt it sinece its the most like Outlook. Why put a lot of engineering effort into something that can be taken much more quickly and adapted? That is one of the strengths of Open Source. > Ultimately, these decisions will be made by folks at Sun (and maybe IBM, > et. al.) and our respective opinions mean squat, bumpkiss, nada. Not if you are a coder and want it badly enough. But in this case I would be quite happy for Novell to do the job form me. > This is > all a perfectly pointless discussion anyway. The idea that the greater > OOo "community" has any real influence is naive. It does have influence - base is living proof. However, its not as influential as it could be if for example the code was donated to a foundation that was independent of Sun. Of course if that meant Sun reducing its contribution, overall it would be a bad thing. > In any case, I'm not particularly advocating the addition of whole new > components and features -- not now at least. My speculations were for > the far, distant, future (5 - 10 yrs in computer time). Is computer time different from human time? In 10 years, OOo will be up to about version 6 or 7 and I expect that there will be a whole range of applications for operating on ODF files we haven't even thought about yet. Most people will be using mail clients other than outlook probably built into consumer electronics devices and desktop computers of the type we see now will be massively less influential -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMSL --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
