[plug] horrors!

[The Thought Assassin]

On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, Beau Kuiper wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > But if the GPL version <of StarOffice> becomes available anytime soon,
> > it will be stripped back and componentized long before Microsoft could
> > release a beta-quality port of MSOffice.
> GPL is not a quick cure for poor design and heavy bloat. Example netscape,

Mozilla is not under the GPL. Mozilla did not start off with a working
codebase. (though some might claim N4.x is working for an arbitrarily low
value of "working".)

> need I say more! I doubt anyone has the guts to learn how staroffice works
> enough to strip all the crap out of it.
A whole lot of people have learnt to do it with Mozilla which was a _far_
harder target. StarOffice is already composed of many parts that are just
over-integrated. Mozilla was a monolithic mess, hence the complete
rewrite.

> This includes:
> 	1) That pathetic web browser
It must die.
> 	2) Desktop for crying sake
Die. Die. Die.
> 	3) Its own widget set.
If I am not mistaken, Sun is moving it to gtk themselves, using the people
who wrote the thing in the first place.

> > Hopefully some cross-pollination <between Abiword and> SO will occur.
> Do you do much coding.
A lot.
Have you seen the Abiword source?

> Do you know how difficult it is to get 2 peices of completely different
> code to work together? It generally isn't fun.
Not in general, no. That's why Bonobo was invented. Of course Bonobo is
no panacea, but in general, these two projects should be particularly
compatible for exchange of ideas, code and interfaces.

-Greg Mildenhall