Weekly Edition
Return to the Development pageSponsored link
Vyatta –
Linux & Open Source
Alternative to Cisco –
Advanced Routing,
Firewall, VPN, QoS..
Free Download ->
| |||||||||||
The Importance of KOffice
KDE.News takes a look at
KOffice. "The functionality KOffice has already reached in its short
life is significant. And still, KOffice has good performance and is fully
usable on low-end hardware, which makes it suited for organizations and
individuals. This could even save costs when upgrading or migrating the
office software and old hardware can be reused."
(Log in to post comments)
The Importance of KOffice Posted Jan 17, 2005 20:32 UTC (Mon) by bluefoxicy (guest, #25366) [Link] People who actually use office software tell me that KOffice is pretty poor.
Myself, I don't really like it. It's flashy and all, but if you're serious, it's still a toy. Line spacing in Kword I can't find any way to set to being in pts (which is used in every other office app); and RTF handling is still poor (the same gripe I have with OO.o). Gnumeric and AbiWord step far beyond Kword and Kspread.
KPresenter is nice, but it's at best "Incomplete." Many features are missing. Last I tried, I think the major problem I had was that it didn't want to do click and timed actions on the same slide.
The Importance of KOffice Posted Jan 17, 2005 22:10 UTC (Mon) by buxtonp (guest, #27329) [Link] "I can't find any way to set to being in pts (which is used in every otheroffice app)" Configure>Kword>Misc>Set Units to Pts Format>Paragraph>Lines and Spacings> Set line spacing to number of points required. Sorted!
The Importance of KOffice Posted Jan 18, 2005 9:02 UTC (Tue) by hingo (subscriber, #14792) [Link] I think the things missing from KOffice are minor issues. For instance, if it was more popular, it would be a trivial task for someone to draw a set of prettier icons. The main problem is that you will never be able to run KOffice on Windows, because of the Qt licensing model. Because that's were people will choose OpenOffice and Mozilla (and GIMP even) and KOffice and Konqi will loose out before people even get to Linux.I have never understood Trolltechs policy not to release QT-GPL for Windows. It seems they are only hurting themselves. Technically it would be the superior toolkit, but for some reason they don't seem to want their toolkit becoming the dominant one. As for KOffice, maybe switching to the same native fileformat with OOo 2 will help, but as these things are complicated, we'll have to wait and see how good it really works.
The Importance of KOffice Posted Jan 18, 2005 10:14 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] The reason Trolltech hasn't released a GPL Qt for Windows is plain andsimple: most of their customers use Qt to develop in-house applications. If there were a GPL version they could use that and still stay within the limits of the license. Trolltech would lose a lot of revenue, go broke and stop working on Qt. But there's no reason for being fatalistic about having a KOffice on Windows. Jaroslav Staniek is working on porting enough of KDE to Windows to make KOffice work.
The Importance of KOffice Posted Jan 18, 2005 16:27 UTC (Tue) by hingo (subscriber, #14792) [Link] Ok, I knew there must be a reason, I just didn't understand what it was. Thanks for enlightening me.
The Importance of KOffice Posted Jan 19, 2005 8:44 UTC (Wed) by kzin (guest, #841) [Link] Qt is licensed under the GPL (and QPL), making it illegal to link it (I'm using terms loosely here) with proprietary software, whether Windows _or_ Linux. By GPLing the Windows version of Qt, Trolltech should only lose revenue from customers who pay Trolltech to link Qt with their GPLd Windows software. I suspect that there are not too many of those.
On the other hand, enforcing a requirement that no-one links proprietary software with your publicly downloadable GPL library (in this case Windows Qt) is certainly harder than simply making the library unavailable to the general public.
The Importance of KOffice Posted Jan 19, 2005 8:49 UTC (Wed) by kzin (guest, #841) [Link] Oh, sorry. I just reread your comment and saw that you referred to "inline applications" and not to any applications.
Now I am enlightened too.
The Importance of KOffice Posted Jan 21, 2005 22:08 UTC (Fri) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link] hingo wrote:I have never understood Trolltech's policy not to release QT-GPL for Windows. If you want it so much, why don't you port the GPL/QPL-covered Linux source code? You have full source code under open-source licensing; don't you feel a bit silly complaining that someone else isn't willing to open source his own porting work just so you can run the codebase under free-software terms on your bizarre proprietary platform? And it's a bit undignified to lobby for open-source code releases, isn't it? Honestly, though, it seems difficult to believe that you don't know why they use the licensing strategy they use: It's an effective and obvious part of their business model. If you don't like that business model, you could code your way past it, given a bit of initiative. But of course, with markedly less initiative, one can get off that bizarre proprietary platform entirely, which I believe nicely illustrates the genius of Trolltech's approach.
|
|||||||||||