Erwin's StarOffice Tango

New Zealand could invest the $100M in OpenOffice.org development
I just became aware of this article via my colleague's blog. I'm not a Mac user yet, although I'm sure my next privately purchased laptop will be a MacBook Pro since I've seen it run Solaris very well in parallel to Mac OS X. Nevertheless, I know many people who are already successfully using OpenOffice.org on the Mac every day. Thus, I'm sure that the schools in New Zealand could easily use OpenOffice.org as an alternative to Microsoft Office.

However, I also admit that the Mac version of OpenOffice.org is still not perfect. Therefore, in case people in New Zealand are too concerned about the quality of OpenOffice.org, I wanted to suggest that New Zealand could invest the $100M mentioned in the article, or at least a percentage of it, into the development of OpenOffice.org. Such an approach would have multiple advantages:

First, students could help with the development of OpenOffice.org as part of their computer science curriculum. It would be like a Google Summer of Code project, except that the funding would not come from Google but from a government. In addition, local companies could be contracted with OpenOffice.org development and customization tasks which would lead to a local software economy.

Second, since OpenOffice.org can be used everywhere, i.e. at all schools, universities, and government agencies, every dollar invested in the development of OpenOffice.org would save licensing fees somewhere else.

Third, if a government like New Zealand invested in OpenOffice.org development, more governments probably would follow. For example, as can be seen on this wiki page, the French government is a heavy user of OpenOffice.org. Thus, France would be another good candidate.

Forth, the adoption of OpenOffice.org would also ease the adoption of a truly open document exchange format which is supported by many different applications on many different platforms. Thus, vendor lock-in would be decreased.

Anyway, I'm convinced we will see a lot more cases like the one in New Zealand over the next few months and years!
( Mai 30 2007, 09:18:06 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [2]

Kommentare:

I would suggest that if these kinds of sums are invested, then KOffice would be a better target for the investment. Why? Because:

It is much easier to develop for it.
OpenOffice.org (OOo) is 6 MLOC while KOffice is only around 850 KLOC. This factor of ~8 in code size is also mirrored in a much less complex code structure and bigger return on investment.
It is much more customizable
The internal structure of KOffice and the way that the GUI is built on top of the internal data structures lends itself very well for customization; much more than OOo.
It is more comprehensive
KOffice has several components that are not part of OOo, such as a high-featured bitmap editor (Krita), and a project planning tool (KPlato).
It is more extensible
The way that KOffice is built with heavy use of plugins makes it easy, even for the non core developer to extend its feature set. This is perfect for education where kids with special needs demand special solutions.
It is more portable
This may sound strange, but since the version of KOffice currently under development builds on the inherently portable Qt4 toolkit, KOffice will run on all major platforms with a native look-and-feel.

There is much more, but this will suffice for now.

So what are the disadvantages? I can see two:

OOo is currently more developed than KOffice.
OOo is much more mature than KOffice. However, with a sum like $100M, I can guarantee that the end result will be in KOffice's favor.
There is no large company like SUN behind it (yet).
This is a big disadvantage on the surface, but in reality it's easy to let local companies take the first level support, and then have a small but focused company that offers second level support and other high-level services take on the difficult problems. We must also not forget that TrollTech, the company behind Qt is bigger than the whole Star Office division within SUN.

Gesendet von Inge Wallin am Mai 30, 2007 at 11:23 AM CEST #

I agree with Igne except that OOo port to the Mac is more actively developed (they just release an Aqua snapshot last week). Also the ODF support is better implemented in OOo (KOffice still have some issues). There are also usability issues with Kwrite since is frame based and will be more alien to ex-MSOffice users.

Gesendet von JZA am Mai 30, 2007 at 04:54 PM CEST #