On 8/17/05, Brian Lunergan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It all seems to have started with somebody's comment that they didn't feel any > obligation to support those with older machines. That's all well and good, but > who is he/she to dictate what type of machine or OS I should run? I run an AMD > 800Mhz with 256 of memory and, while I know the rabid *nix supporters will > sneer at it, it runs just fine on Win98SE. Thanks very much. If the > implication > is that OOo should only support a certain flavour of *nix on the latest, > greatest, and fastest of machines while running like a dog on anything else or > not at all I will simply stop using it and look elsewhere for good software. > > Why should there be such disrespect for other people's choice in equipment, > OS, > or application software? It always seems to give way to a phallic, need for > speed argument that brings back those tales of a bunch of little boys having a > pissing contest to see whose equipment is the biggest and best.
I think you miss the point. It's not a matter of should we make OOo run only on the newest and fastest hardware and software. Obviously, making an effort to limit our user base would be ludicrous. However, I believe the thrust of the original post is, we shouldn't make an big deal out of making sure it can run on machines that will likely die in the next 12 months anyway. I mean, we could spend the next year making every effort to get OpenOffice.org to run in DOS, or Apple OS 3, or on an Atari 2600 - but such an effort would be vain. We may gain every DOS box in the world, and have reach 2,500 people with OpenOffice.org, and half of those computer will be trashed by year's end. *OR* we could spend the next making improvements and advances to OOo on the systems it already works on, and reach 250,000 or 2.5 million by our improved feature set. The question is, what should we be spending our ultra-limited resources on? (And by that, I don't mean money, since we don't have a budget at all, I mean coding hours, bugfixes, marketing efforts, etc..) Should we be trying to make OOo run on a 486 machine with 12 MB of RAM and Windows 3.1, or a Performa 7100 with Mac OS 8, or a Tandy 1000? Or should we be trying to make Impress use animation, a new mode of OOo for Desktop Publishing, Draw accept SVG import and export, etc.? I would gather that most people would agree with the later. Again, I am by no means suggesting that we fill OOo with bloat so it requires a gig and a half of Ram and a 3.5 Ghz 64-bit processor and takes up a terabyte of space - I'm just saying that let's spend our efforts making OOo the best it can be, not to make it work on antique systems with dead operating systems. -Chad Smith --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
