Koffice 1.3 Released 343
perbert writes "On January 27th, the KDE Project released KOffice 1.3 for Linux and Unix operating systems. KOffice is a free set of office applications that integrate with the award winning KDE desktop. KOffice is a light-weight yet feature rich office solution and provides a variety of filters to interoperate with other popular office suites such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office."
Too many office choices on Linux now! (Score:5, Insightful)
I really enjoy KDE thanks for the great job people (Score:1, Insightful)
GNOME is also a nice Desktop solution but has a very long way to reach the same functionality, integration, quality and easy to use as KDE offers today. The developers should start making it stable and usable for the endusers rather than 'hacking' around in it with no serious visible target for the enduser.
Lightweight ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Any office suite without the clippy thing ?
MS Filters (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This can only be a good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
FANatics...
Re:been using openoffice (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, Abiword has its problems, but I think it's better in the long run (for me). I think KOffice isn't as mature as GNOME Office (Maybe with 1.3, this statement is wrong), but I think people are putting a lot of stock in OpenOffice and I'm not totally impressed.
Open Office Environment (Score:3, Insightful)
But could someone outline the principal benefits of KOffice over OpenOffice or vice versa? In what way are these better than MS Office (functionality not price) for an office product implementation?
Having a choice is great, but I'd prefer the best features, and as with all type-2 errors if I don't know what I'm missing, I don't miss it.
Re:I don't quite get... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't quite get... (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps reading the files themselves isn't as hard as mapping them onto your own representation of a document. OpenOffice seems to have been reasonably like Office from the time I first saw it around '99 I believe (as StarOffice). KDE is effectively a design from scratch, although various things come out working similarly, because they are reasonable design decisions. As a consequence, even though the open world knows the data format of Word files to a large extent, reading them into KOffice is still hard.
This wild guess bought to you by not_cub.
Re:Speculation (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, KWord is built on top of KDE's component/toolkit architecture that is a world apart from MacOS X Carbon/Cocoa API. While Qt allows a native port to Aqua, it does not offer a native port to Carbon or Coca, and Apple is unlikely to establish a third desktop API on its platform just for the sake of getting a functionally rather limited word processor that, at the moment, has no dramatic advantage over the old Claris/AppleWorks offering.
And keep in mind that for Safari, Apple just used the engine (KHTML) of a free program, not the GUI application (konqueror) itself, in the same way it put its own (proprietary) GUI on top of Mach and BSD. From I experience, I doubt that KWord and Abiword are, in their present state, as attractive as "engines" as BSD and KHTML were. If it all, Abiword seems a more likely candidate since it's designed as a cross-plattform application and, quite in opposition to KWord, focuses on getting base functions and usability right before acquiring more nifty/hackerish features such as frame-based page layout and importing PDF files.
What makes your scenario very unlikely in the end are licensing issues. KOffice and Abiword are GPLed code and thus would require Apple to release any program based on them under the GPL. Which doesn't fit to the company's successful tactics of putting slick, but proprietary GUIs on top BSD- or LPGL-licensed hacker code like BSD and KHTML. A GPLed "iWord" that could be ported back to Linux and even Windows would, unlike the current i-apps, be no exclusive selling point for MacOS X.
-F
Re:Open Office Environment (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole office suite idea is flawed and only serves to line the pockets of commercial office suite producers and to create a winner-takes-all (and user-gets-screwed) environment. If it suits my particular preferences and needs, I ought to be able to run the word processor from KOffice, the spreadsheet from OpenOffice, and some commercial charting program and have them all interoperate.
If we have interoperability based on open standards, then software competes on its merits. (With the understanding, often lost here on Slashdot, that the merits of software are a matter of individual needs and opinions.) Without open interoperability, we have vendor lock-in and monopolies.
Re:Speculation (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.
Now, assuming you are not the CEO of the company, why exactly is this a desireable situation again? The above seems like an unequivocally bad deal for the community of developers, and I say, thank goodness the GPL prevents such shenanigans.
since QT is GPL'd... commercial QT applications must pay for a license
If people want to profit from code based on the excellent Qt toolkit, why should they not have to pay Trolltech for the privelige of using their excellent toolkit? TT is gracious enough to allow free (beer and speech) usage of Qt for noncommercial uses, and their commercial license fees are by most accounts very reasonable. It isn't as if they are starved for customers.
You don't have to buy a license for even MS application development
What the hell are you talking about? Assuming you aren't referring to illegal MS application development, can you please explain this? How do you obtain the MS API, core libraries, and development environment without buying a license to use at least soem flavor of Windows, and probably VB, or another MS-compatible IDE as well?
Re:KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking (Score:2, Insightful)
As one poster already pointed out earlier, KHTML is LGPL, but KOffice is not. So Apple can't take the core of KOffice and build their own stuff around it without releasing it all under the GPL. With KHTML, they only released the changes to KHTML, but not the stuff built on top of it.
Re:Try both. (Score:5, Insightful)