Having never seen the point of KOffice i tried to look for a mission statement but couldn't find one.

I guess my question is, wouldn't it be better for everyone if the developers behind KOffice used their time on OpenOffice and it's integration with KDE instead spending valuable time on an office suite that has a reeeeeally small user base ?

Please don't see this as a destructive post, i mean the best for the KDE community. But i've shared this thought with more Linux and KDE users and they seemed to share this opinion. There's not many people that seem to get the point of yet another office suite.

Thanks.

OpenOffice has a large, convoluted codebase and it's mostly worked on directly from people at Sun. It's still complicated for external contributors to add their work there. Also, being built over the top of an existing project (StarOffice) it's difficult to make radical changes.
KOffice is much leaner, written using (IMO) a better toolkit (Oo.org has its own toolkit) and, although it could use some more developers, can actually experiment, and potentially innovate. Not to mention it's also faster, performance wise.

It exists because 1) It started long before openoffice existed. 2) There's developers that wants to work on it.

einar wrote:OpenOffice has a large, convoluted codebase and it's mostly worked on directly from people at Sun. It's still complicated for external contributors to add their work there. Also, being built over the top of an existing project (StarOffice) it's difficult to make radical changes.
KOffice is much leaner, written using (IMO) a better toolkit (Oo.org has its own toolkit) and, although it could use some more developers, can actually experiment, and potentially innovate. Not to mention it's also faster, performance wise.

If it's so much better why is it that very few people use it then?
It's not even installed by default anymore on KDE based distros like openSUSE.

psn wrote:It exists because 1) It started long before openoffice existed. 2) There's developers that wants to work on it.

I get that, i'm just trying to figure out what motivates the developers to keep working on a product that has been around for a long time, never could build a large user base and a lot more generally used similar product exists.

hpalma wrote:If it's so much better why is it that very few people use it then?

Because the number of people has not any relation with the quality. Just see how many people uses Windows, for instance (was easy, but real).

hpalma wrote:It's not even installed by default anymore on KDE based distros like openSUSE.

We all hope it will be in few months... So let's see the future versions of distros.

hpalma wrote:

psn wrote:It exists because 1) It started long before openoffice existed. 2) There's developers that wants to work on it.

I get that, i'm just trying to figure out what motivates the developers to keep working on a product that has been around for a long time, never could build a large user base and a lot more generally used similar product exists.

If I'm going to be working on a software project in my spare time, I'm going to pick one that is lean, well-written with plenty of scope for future innovation rather than one that is approximately 5 times(!) bigger and which requires a big team of full-time devs to keep going. In short, I'm likely to pick the one that is both enjoyable and easy to work with.

As to the userbase: I can't speak for the KOffice devs, but I simply don't care about the number of users my software might have (I guess it's vaguely useful for bragging rights/ ego boosting, but I'll bet that the novelty would wear off quite quickly ) and anyway, who is to say that it won't attract a large following in the future?

The short answer is: Because they can
Long answer: Not everyone want's to use and develop openoffice, since it can't suit everybody's needs. You are also forgeting that koffice is krita, that is a really nice app, in some areas better than gimp.

I've been working on KWord for almost 10 years (on and off) and I do this because I believe we can do better than MSOffice and OpenOffice. Usability wise and in ways-of-working.
KOffice aims to let go of the old ways of thinking of office applications, plugins galore!

As others stated, people choose what they work on. If you forbid me to work on KOffice there is very little chance I'll start working on OpenOffice instead. Thats just not how people think. Imagine someone told you that you should become a teacher or a dentist because there is a shortage there. It just doesn't work like that.

I apologize for the lack of content on our website, we just 3 weeks ago released KOffice2.0.0 and we need some time to make the website catch up.
Volunteers welcome, btw

The main justification for KOffice2 is that, apart from KOffice1, it is the first office suite to be built from the ground up for over twenty years. All the other suites are based on concepts from the 1980s or, in the case of MSOffice, the 1970s.

Another is that it is easier to localise KOffice2 and in many countries, lack of experienced IT personnel means that anything that can make it easier to localise software is an advantage.

That said, there are things that OO does better than KOffice but, for me the things that KWord does better than OO make it invaluable. I hope that KOffice has a long future but, even if it doesn't, I suspect it will be an inspiration to others to rethink how you develop office software.

zander wrote:I've been working on KWord for almost 10 years (on and off) and I do this because I believe we can do better than MSOffice and OpenOffice. Usability wise and in ways-of-working.
KOffice aims to let go of the old ways of thinking of office applications, plugins galore!

As others stated, people choose what they work on. If you forbid me to work on KOffice there is very little chance I'll start working on OpenOffice instead. Thats just not how people think. Imagine someone told you that you should become a teacher or a dentist because there is a shortage there. It just doesn't work like that.

I apologize for the lack of content on our website, we just 3 weeks ago released KOffice2.0.0 and we need some time to make the website catch up.
Volunteers welcome, btw

Oh! Oh! This, I CAN do!
I've been wanting to aid the KDE project for a while now. I'm still beginning to learn C++ and can't get my head around object-oriented programming,but I AM web-savvy. I could write a few pages featuring each application, new features, screenshots etc.

... Would that help?

I've got an immediate answer; OpenOffice crashed and then tried to recover the (very long) file I had been editing prior to exporting it in doc format for a Word user - unsuccessfully - time and time again. So I opened the unrecovered file with KOffice, exported it to RTF and then asked OpenOffice to open the RTF file which it did successfully.

It's always worth having an alternative for when the totally unexpected happens.

It exists because for some people it is far better than openoffice. When it will be able to use the doc, docx and rtf format then OO.o will forever leave my pc(until then I write them in KOffice and save them in OO..

I know KDEOffice and I like it but I use OO all the time. Why? Because MSOffice compatibility. At work we have MSOffice and there are no problem to open MS Word, Excell, Powerpoint file on OO. I don't know now but it was (is) impossible with KDE Office.

But if you are a home user with no need to exchange documents with MS Word users or a business user like myself with only an occasional need to exchange documents with MS Word users, then KWord is fine - particular now that I can simply pass a KWord document through OO if a Word user wants a copy of it rather than just a PDF.