KDE.org: KDE and OpenOffice Oct 16, 2000, 05 :52 UTC (8 Talkback[s]) (8913 reads) (Other stories by Navindra Umanee)
"Sun Microsystems, probably best known at the KDE end of the spectrum for their
influential paper on local vs distributed computing, recently open-sourced
StarOffice, making it freely available to KDE as well as other projects. What
impact will this have on KDE and KOffice? Ideally, even though OpenOffice is technically a
competitor to KOffice (Sun apparently denies this) and despite the naysayers, OpenOffice will
be of sizable benefit to KDE. Read on for a few of my initial thoughts on the matter."
"While OpenOffice is certainly a huge contribution to the free software community, it will likely
take a certain amount of effort to integrate it well into today's free desktops[1]. Judging by
the technical overview, OpenOffice contains and is based on a huge chunk of inhouse
technology, implying that there are ways to go before a port to a free desktop environment
that is compatible with all the goals of the project is complete. There is no immediate need for
such a rewrite, of course, as OpenOffice is already useful and porting existing working code
will be a significant task with little or no actual benefit for the applications proper. In fact, a
reckless rewrite ala Mozilla might be dangerous from a market perspective, so caution is
advised. In the interim, OpenOffice appears slick and polished enough to pass for a KDE1
application and that could be sufficient for now."
