[plug] horrors!

[Christian]

On Fri, Aug 18, 2000 at 10:56:28AM +0800, The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > 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".)

Mozilla IS under the GPL now actually (although I take your point that
it wasn't then).  Still, Beau is definitely right that a free license
will not necessarily mean that all StarOffice's various ills will be
cleansed anytime soon.  The case of Netscape is a really good example of
this.  BTW, I think the original Mozilla code did more or less work --
I'm basing this purely on the show that was on SBS recently where they
showed the Netscape coders trying to get bugs out of the code in order
to release it.  Since they supposedly got most of the main bugs out then
you would have to assume the code was at least semi-working... (I could
easily be wrong about this though.)

> > 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.

Why would Mozilla be a harder target than SO?  I would definitely have
though SO would consist of more code and, given it's less than stellar
performance, the code would probably be in worst shape.

 
> > 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.

It'll be interesting to see who's right here.  I'm hoping it's Greg but
Beau is definitely right that it will be a hard job, Bonobo or not.
Still, the GNOME people have done wonders so far and they're starting to
get some serious commercial backing.  If GNOME+StarOffice (LGPL'd) becomes
defacto on Solaris systems then it would have to be reasonably stable
before being released and since it's all free code then the GNOME
project (and GNU in general) can benefit from it.  Guess we'll just wait
and see...

Regards,

Christian.