“That brings me to a number of details beyond the switch to GPL
that make Sun’s announcement interesting. The most intriguing fact
is that Sun plans to split the office suite into individual
application components. There are several reasons why Sun needs to
do that. On the surface, it will make StarOffice more usable.
StarOffice is currently a monolithic suite that takes longer to
launch than it takes Microsoft to release a security patch. As I
said, most of the time I only use two pieces of the suite, the word
processor and the personal information manager. It would be a great
relief to be able to launch only the applications I use, especially
if that translates into faster launch times and less memory
consumption. Who knows? If I could launch the StarOffice PIM
separately, I might even go back to using the Applixware word
processor, although I’d be perfectly happy with the StarOffice word
processor if it just didn’t eat up so much RAM.”
“Sun also wants to give the StarOffice components a Bonobo
compatibility layer (Bonobo is the CORBA-compliant object model
used by the GNOME desktop). I was a bit ambivalent about that
decision at first. On the one hand, I am somewhat sour on GNOME of
late and would have preferred to have seen StarOffice integrate
more tightly with KDE. But as much as I prefer KDE to GNOME, I have
to admit that the KDE team could turn out to be shortsighted with
respect to its component strategy. On the down side, CORBA is
sluggish and complex, and it is largely responsible for the lack of
responsiveness of some GNOME tools. But I still believe the GNOME
developers got it right in choosing CORBA, at least in the long
run. Computers will continue to get faster, which will eventually
make the speed a nonissue. And developers will continue to write
better tools for creating and integrating CORBA components, making
those components easier to use and manage.”
“It probably doesn’t matter anyway. Greater interoperability
between KDE and GNOME components is supposedly already in the
works. Sun’s choice of Bonobo will simply increase the pressure on
KDE to make its component architecture work seamlessly with
Bonobo.“