Daniel Carrera wrote:
Randomthots wrote:
It would be stupid for OOo to try to do everything. It has to make a
decision about what it's trying to be, and stick to that.
Sure. But is that decision carved in stone? Regardless of customer
demand or desire? BTW, what exactly is the "it" making this decision?
it == OOo as in "the project"
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.
And customers very rarely consider these
things. It's very easy to ask for the sun the moon and the stars, but we
have to make decisions about where we can and should spend our time.
Also consider the fact that in the case of volunteers, you (the
"customer"), have no right to tell them where to spend their spare time.
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! You know as well as I do that the vast majority of the code
is written by paid programmers whose sole function in life is to code
for OOo. These are paid employees, primarily of Sun Corp. but also a few
from Novell and other places. In fact, I recall more than one discussion
about how hard it was for volunteer hacker-bees to actually get code
accepted.
When dealing with a volunteer force, the concept of "customer" is a bit
blurry.
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.
I wasn't really trying to say that OOo *should* be everything to
everybody. I wasn't even particularly talking about OOo, but rather
ODF/XML and how it relates to HTML.
You took a statement that "OOo should only cover xyz" to mean
"OpenDocument should only cover xyz". You took a division of
applications intended for OOo (office vs communiction) and applied it to
the file format.
No, I didn't. I never even mentioned OOo except by implication with
regards to your stance against including those components. My main point
is and has always been that this division between productivity and
communication is arbitrary and mostly in your own head.
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.
Ultimately, these decisions will be made by folks at Sun (and maybe IBM,
et. al.) and our respective opinions mean squat, bumpkiss, nada. This is
all a perfectly pointless discussion anyway. The idea that the greater
OOo "community" has any real influence is naive.
Saying that OOo should stick to being an office suite
has nothing to do with whether the OpenDocument file format should be
able to cover things that aren't part of office productivity.
I wasn't making prescriptive statements, rather my comments were meant
to be descriptive and predictive.
What the heck? Should doesn't imply either preference or moral
obligation. It can perfectly well be (as in the example of where OOo
should allocate resources) purely a result of balancing what users want
with technical merit and the realities of our resources.
You act like this judgment is the output of a mathematical equation. It
may be informed and considered and very rational, but it still is in the
end an opinion. An opinion and a judgment on which reasonable people can
reasonably disagree.
You're making a ridiculous assertion out one word. Geez!
Saying "it's just an opinion" is ridiculous. Some things are actually
not just opinions. You can't say that the earth is flat and that my
position that it's round is just an opinion. Here I am talking about
allocation of resources. We should (yes, should) try to get the most
bang for the resources we have.
Around this time last year, I recall some fairly vigorous -- sometimes
even heated -- discussions regarding the development of the Base
component to more directly compete against Access. I don't recall which
side you came down on, but the arguments against it were remarkably
similar to the one's you make now.
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). My main point of
disagreement with you in the past has been your assertion that
communication tools fundamentally don't "belong" in an office suite. I
have no disagreement with arguments based on limited resources, so I
would think this debate can rest for a time. Beat down the bugs that are
going to crop up, trim the code, AND take careful note of public
reaction to the product. Don't rule anything out at this point.
--
Rod
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