Re: [Fsfe-uk] Go OGo Go!

[Alex Hudson]

On Sat, 2003-07-12 at 14:37, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> OGo is all about open standards so should be no problem for either 
> Ximian or Evolution hackers, I guess.

Hopefully not, I guess it's a case of whether or not they want to. Camel
isn't the easiest of things for people to hack on IME though.

> The licensing model also seems very favourable for a wider set of 
> developers to jump in.

This is true.

> >I would suspect that W32 groupware software is still very much further
> >advanced than any free software, 
> 
> Any specific details will be most helpful but there is a  perception 
> factor too

I'm not sure that people perceive Exchange to be anything of any note ;)
But there are a lot of 'configuration' type features which are very easy
in the proprietary solutions, but require a lot more work in free
solutions - having person A be able to manage person B's email/contacts
for example is often difficult. 

OGo is the one piece of software that has attempted to bring document
management to the table, which I guess is one big improvement - no other
free solution has that in any way atm.

> ...but it could be viewed as healthy competition within the free 
> software community.

Oh sure, I have nothing against competition per se, but for competition
to be useful the things competing have to provide something slightly
different. I'm not sure they are in this case - indeed, Kolab and OGo
are based off much of the same software (i.e., both use Cyrus to provide
IMAP support). They are much more glue projects than anything else,
although that's less true of OGo I think.

> The differences are mainly along the lines of ...
> OGo integrates with OpenOffice.org (OOo)
> <http://groupware.openoffice.org/glow/>
> The code is Java.....

... and they link to an article by well-known GPL hater Brett Glass:

        "In short, by GPLing your code, you are participating in a
        vendetta -- Stallman's vendetta against commercial programmers.
        You may want to read up on Stallman's story and history before
        you continue to do harm in this way."

I'm usually not a language fascist either, but I don't understand the
choice of Java (well, I do, Sun are developing it). Swing doesn't
integrate well into anything AFAIK, but maybe they can pull it off. I'm
certainly not installing any type of Java anytime soon to run something
like that, and it would be a miracle (IMHO) if it manages to run with
decent speed on a free interpreter if at all.

> Further I have seen noises to get OOo/GTK is to  be integrated more in 
> to the GNOME desktop more seemlessly as a complete suite.

Ximian have done a lot of work on this; their version of OOo is quite
nice (uses Gnome stock icons, GnomeVFS, etc.) I think the only stuff
which really gives it away as not native-GTK is the loading time.

> The web interface/application  is also immensely powerful instead of 
> being a temporary fix.
> Does XUL support 'drag and drop'?

XUL does; the OGo interface is not XUL afaik. You're right in general,
web applications can be very powerful, but the lack of decent text
editing facility makes it a bit of a bore for this kind of stuff IMO.

Cheers,

Alex.

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