Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 21st Mar 2008 21:49 UTC
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RE[5]: Challenge yourself
by porcel on Sun 23rd Mar 2008 11:09
in reply to "RE[4]: Challenge yourself"




Member since:
2005-07-13
It's a natural question, and it's come up in the past. Certainly it would be advantageous and would be within licensing guidelines. Ethical? I'll let the philosophers argue that point, other than to say I don't think it would be unethical.
But from what I gather, the devs have run into two core problems with the OOo2 source; first, it's somewhat of a spaghetti mess of code that is difficult to work with, some of it dating back a decade or more, and second, that the nature of the way OOo2 manages document formats is structurally different from KOffice, and would require a major refactoring (basically a re-write) in order to adopt the MSO compatibility. So they've looked at it, but determined it's not feasible.
This does suck, because I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. I vastly prefer KOffice to OOo2 because I find it much "lighter" and far better integrated with KDE, but yet the minimal MSO compatibility is a deal-breaker since I have no choice but to deal with MSO files at work. Yet OOo2 I find to be a very clunky and somewhat dated app to use, though with more useful functionality than KOffice. The worst part is that neither works well enough for what I need, so I'm stuck with VirtualBox and Office2003. Would that it was otherwise...