OSNews

Developers spend a lot of time and effort porting applications to Windows in the vain hope that people will move to an alternative platform, and what happens? People continue to sit on Windows and use the same applications.

I agree that the work in porting to Windows is misguided if the application requires significant re-coding, it sort of dilutes the value of collaboration in the OSS model and becomes somewhat of a fork.

However, the (theoretical) advantage to the KDE4 approach is that the heavy lifting is pretty much done by Qt and the core libs as far as cross-platform capability.

So a project like KOffice could (theoretically) attract developers interested in the capabilities on Windows but by using the existing framework, ultimately contribute to the alternative platforms as well. The project becomes KOffice, not KOffice on Windows vs KOffice on *nix. By expanding the reach of the application, users on all platforms can (theoretically) benefit by drawing from greater exposure to potential developers. I do perhaps naively believe that there are developers working with Windows for pragmatic reasons that would still be interested in contributing to open software on Windows. The Qt/KDE4 approach can ease their ability to participate in a large-scale collaborative OSS project.

Of course, it really remains to be seen once the libs are released and people can assess what's really involved from a technical/developmental POV. But I do think there's no harm in expanding the reach of free software as long as the effort to port free software to closed platforms doesn't detract from the the support of free software on open platforms.

Still, I'll admit there's a lot of theoreticals involved in my probably idealistic view, and this is just my 2c...