Peter Kupfer OOo wrote:
What would be so bad if we were an overall office suite, payroll and all. I agree that is unnecessary, but what is the harm, if it could work.
The harm is that it's very poor design to have a single program that tries to do everything. It's not just a matter of bloat. The code quickly becomes unmanageable and stangant, and impossible to update or fix. Modularity is a very important principle of of proper design. It is a lot easier to maintain 10 programs of 1,000 lines each than one program of 10,000 lines. Incidentally, the monolithic model (the opposite of modularity) is one of the reasons why Windows is unreliable, and why it's so difficult for Microsoft to fix it. I read a report last year which essentially said that Windows has grown so big that trying to fix one part of the code is just as likely to produce an equally destructive bug on another part of the code.
From the customer's POV there's another reason, and that is choice. Modularity means that you can move modules around. For example, in Windows there is only one graphical interface. In Linux there is Gnome, KDE, Afterstep, Sawfish, Englihtenment, Icewm, Blackfox, fvwm and a dozen others.
More realistically, why would it be /bad/ to include Mozilla with OOo? It seems, that if we could get it integrated, that it would only be good.
It depends on what you mean by "integrate". The idea of them talking to each other through clear, software-independent interfaces is very good. But putting them all in the same codebase would wreck everything. Integration does not imply monolithic models. Integration with modularity is great.
"What functionality do we currently not have that merging OOo and Mozilla would provide us?"
Groupware: calendar and email. This can be achieved with the "good" integration. Cheers, Daniel.
