OLS Day 3: Failed experiments, Linux-Tiny, and the Linux Standard Base (NewsForge)

I also liked:

> KOffice, he pointed out, has less code than the Linux kernel,
> which in turn has a fraction the code of all of KDE, which in
> turn has less code than OpenOffice.org.

As if code bloat is a good thing.

--John

(Perhaps what would be best is for KDE and Gnome to adopt huge chunks of Ooo (after all, the screen drivers are a big part of the performance and stablity issues). As if this would ever happen, but...)

If the Lotus Office support were up to scratch, I could safely say that OOo does all I expect of an office suite (people who use WordPerfect might have their own axe to grind, of course :-).

The only other feature I'd require after that is survivability, and having Novell pitch in goes a long way towards realising that in a way understood by other corporations.

I wouldn't advocate pulling developers from KOffice or Gnumeric, which each have their own strengths and each represent an important feature of Open Source: diversity. Yes, packages like Apache and OpenOffice tend to dominate their fields, but Zope and KOffice are still there to try out different ways of doing things, and to offer an instant alternative should some unforeseen disaster take down the popular "leaders" in their field. For this reason it disturbed me to see KOffice dropping their own native formats.

It also worries me that Apache has no peer. It's great software, well maintained and flexible, but it runs 2/3 of all web servers, which is a monocultural disaster waiting to happen. IIS hardly counts, it's a disaster that's already happened (still happens, in a way: I still get the odd CodeRed hit on my servers) and it's heavily subsidised by Microsoft's marketing muscle (meaning that as Microsoft loses mindshare, so will IIS).

I don't see any calls from the Apache organisation urging the Roxen and Zope developers to down tools and join them.

Secondly, moving a developer from one project to another isn't a simple matter of reprinting business cards - it takes a considerable amount of time learning a new code base, and moving to a new one needs to have a lot of advantages. I think the usual result of trying to move to a new project is a loss of momentum and more often than not the developer loses interest and goes somewhere else entirely.

I belive the base idea of Michael Meeks is that OOo is the best project and that it should attract the efforts of the community, what is true, and a good idea,... but he puts it like a "hunt" to costumers, (in the case developers) very usual in agressive marketing campaigns... has the Linux community become a merchadizing 'thing' typical of corporate domination ?...
... no conspiracys and nothing really bad in that... even some very good aspects in it... the problem is that the corporations that dominate the Linux community right now in terms of financing and participating in projects are the ones that have lost badly to Microsoft... and seeming to continue not having many clues why they have lost so badly!

So this "corporate" leardership of Linux community continues with very very little political power, because they could not or would not focus in a general software/hardware platform centered in the needs of the masses of commun users, contrary to a hated Microsoft 'abuser' that continue focused and dominating the masses of users, and that inspite of a more than 20 years old GPL phylosophy that has gived all possible powers to that same users.

So this "corporate" leardership of the Linux community that was supposed to bring focus and a real 'standardizing' effort towards common software/hardware platforms to the typical had-hoc and super entusiastic explosion of the open source method, continues, inspite a growing "over publicised" number of sucess historys, yet without much of a real bang over a Microsoft domination of the Desktop, and specialy of the Server world, and associated applications(Office software bundle included of course).

The problem is that the Desktop and the Server are dominated clearly by the domestic, the SOHO and the Small to Medium Entreprises where the typical Desktop and the Server are from commoditezed parts and rarely have more than 1 phisical processor... is as if the nowaday "corporate" leardership of the Linux community never where tired of loosing to Microsoft... as if they cannot break completly the NIH sindrome and the profit focus... as if they are unabled or unwilling to make the decisive sacrifice towards IT world domination, and are only positioned to attract costumers(developers) to a "milk the caw" economy of scale... contrary to a small family style runned Microsoft, in the hands of old time school friends Gates and Ballmer, that never seemed to have minded to *lose* a fortune by *really* never having done nothing to prevent the domination of the Desktop by a *illegal* White Line that has never contributed a cent to Microsoft, but has enabled them to clearly dominate the gross of the Hardware industry, and wiht that the IT world.