Preamble
I'm going to share my thoughts on Calligra in this blog entry, but I am not a member of the Calligra team. I do follow the mailing lists, and have spoken to several of the people involved over the last year about the various situations. This affords me a somewhat special viewpoint: I'm fairly aware of what's been going on, but not directly involved.
Normally, I wouldn't feel compelled to write anything about it, but there have been a few attempts to provide some analysis on the situation by people outside of the KOffice community. Let's just say that these attempts have been less than impressive, full of speculation and short on fact.
Some Factual Information
So, let's start with some facts: KOffice has experienced an internal fork and in the process has been renamed "Calligra". The fork itself came about through unresolved differences between a member of the KOffice team and the rest of the members over how to manage both long term targets and day-to-day development. This eventually resulted in people coming to the conclusion that those differences were not only unresolved but also unresolvable. To call a one person schism a fork may seem a bit overly dramatic, but that's certainly how it felt to those involved and was not a triviality. Coming to a fork, the rest of the KOffice team took the opportunity of change to rethink various aspects, including the name.
What's in a name? Well, certainly not the quality of a product. It does, however, impact two important things: what people expect from it and what those involved in creating it aim for. It's psychological in both cases, but can have important affects. For a project with a storied past such as KOffice, it seems that the symbolism of changing the name to something new, something that sounds more elegant is significant.
The level of activity around Calligra has been terrific, both leading up to the moment of the fork and rebranding as well as afterwards. There is new energy in the project, and that's a good thing. It may even be viewed as a good turn resulting from a series of sub-optimal choices.
The biggest challenge laying ahead for the people working on Calligra is going to be building a healthy, dynamic community with real leadership around it and a coherent vision under it. In other words: the challenge is to tap the momentum before it dissipates to improve on the foundational issues that KOffice struggled with.
I have faith in my fellow KDE people, and I wish them the best in this.
Where Now?
Future direction is something that the Calligra team will need to communicate clearly over the next weeks, and that will need to build into a visible foundation for where it is going in the long term. What is obvious right away is that Calligra has a dual focus: desktop and mobile. That creates a significant set of design requirements in terms of user interface capabilities and footprint.
Done right, Calligra could become another WebKit, but for documents rather than HTML. It has many of the same characteristics KHTML did back in the day: it's light weight, it's got a number of compelling features, it's flexible and easy to hack on relative to what else is out there and it has the start of commercial adoption.
There is an additional wrinkle here, of course: not all of the Calligra apps are going to be suited for mobile due to the form factor. I expect to find Krita on my desktop as a serious work tool, but not on my N900 due to the tiny screen size if nothing else. Krita on a tablet sounds fun and useful, though.
To really get the most out of Calligra, it would be a tremendous bonus for me to be able to use apps with the same behind-the-scenes engine on my desktop, tablet and smartphone. It's similar to Plasma in this way, only that where in the code the shared-versus-abstracted division starts is a bit different. For Plasma, it's quite high up in the stack allowing for large reuse; this is important as Plasma is meant to be used to create small apps (Plasmoids) with. For Calligra, it's probably going to be deeper in the data and logic handling code, with the user interface being the point at which divergence occurs.
Due to applications like Kexi firmly anchored on larger screen sizes, I don't see a significant shift away from the desktop, but expect this to result in a growth of scope rather than a simple shifting of it. This is good news for everyone using these applications, though it presents some new challenges to the Calligra team both in terms of logistics as well as technology.
It's early days, but I can already see where Calligra could go with this .. and it's an exciting set of possibilities.
9 comments:
I saw a lot of blogs about KDE on the N900 in the recent months, but seriously, wouldn't it be better to concentrate on the desktop? I see no reason to use most of the KDE apps on a portable device, maybe except Marble. Also, what's the future of Meego? I seriously considered buying a N900 some time ago, but am glad as hell now that I decided to get an Android device, where I can also hack around :)
I know that many people think that the future lies in the mobile segment for KDE. I wish however they'd concentrate on the desktop, where they come from and where they did excellent work in the recent 12 Years. :)
@Chris: "I wish however they'd concentrate on the desktop"
we continue to do so. there's this odd thought pattern that happens with "they are doing something mobile, so they must be leaving the desktop behind."
i say it's odd because we keep repeating that isn't what we're doing and you can check that by looking at the commit rates and improvements to the desktop products.
it's an expansion of focus, yes, but it isn't resulting in the desktop becoming a step-child. many KDE application have absolutely no relevance other than on the desktop, in fact.
on the flip side, mobile represents a large new user base for us as well as a source of funding that ends up benefiting the desktop side as well.
ever considered why so many people are working on Calligra now and why it has mobile as a clear platform target? because there is demand as well as funding for it.
the benefit is not only more users for Calligra, but the desktop apps are also getting much improved libraries, filters, etc underneath them.
one of the people involved with that is also the team lead on Krita, which is completely desktop focused (maybe tablet added in future?).
I have 1 question, what will happen with kword development, if it converts into a standalone app then everything is fine but if it tries to make a new entire office suite then what should be done? havind 2 words is 1 thing but 2 office suites? deciding whichs is better, which to include for example in a live ce would be a very difficult task
When I first read about all of this the first thought I had was "wow, they haven't modularized KOffice yet." I saw this for what it was. (I think) Making the office suite more like the rest of KDE-SC reusable, moldable to any hardware/situation, the Lego of the software world. The devs may indeed be spreading themselves and their projects a little too thin with desktop/laptop, netbook/nettop, and moble, we will see as things progress. However I believe this "spreading" is necessary. While I don't know if GNU/Linux will become the leading OS in the coming years I hope that the OS of the masses is free on the inside and KDE on the outside. We need to spread our tendrils far and wide to grab and hold to what the people want is software, hardware, and ideas.
Aaron thanks for this post, it is very much in line to what we think, and hope to achieve.
As for kexi, actually, you can expect it to be available on mobile devices as well, probably not as the full features version. But it is a tool to build database application, for instance, you can build a database of your books with it, it would be extremely cool to be able to access this database from a device that fit to your pocket. And actually, Nokia did sponsor a N900 to one of the Kexi developer to adapt Kexi to that form factor.
@Chris, the Calligra volunteers community is very much dedicated on the desktop. Most of the mobile effort is sponsored by Nokia. What we want to build is a community where both effort can work together.
@Num83rGuy KOffice/Calligra is allready very modular. So much modular that Kivio/Flow is going to be not much more than 2000 lines of code when first released, and still an extremelly powerfull diagramming application. And braindump (a rich notes taking application based on KOffice/Calligra technologies) is about 8000 lines of code.
Even most of the work that is paid for by Nokia is directly useful on the desktop: work on the KWord layout engine (which was very bad, and only now can be improved), work on ODF compliance, work on Microsoft binary and ooxml file import -- all that is immediately useful on the desktop. The only thing Nokia is not interested in is a desktop gui -- but since KOffice makes a separation possible between gui and core, the fact that there are multiple gui's is even an advantage, not a liability.
And on a personal note: I feel that "fork" is very much a wrong word here. It is a split between the KOffice community and one of their members.
I don't think you are correctly invoking WebKit here. Perhaps you should say "the positive aspects of ...."?
I certainly wouldn't wish for developers to quit, or for years of vicious external and internal attacks.
Calligra has gotten some bizarre press, but I doubt that either of the above will be true in the long run, even assuming they are true now.
@Chris:
Mobile development does not mean that desktop does not get the required attention. For example I am currently working on getting KWin on mobile. This will benefit the desktop as all changes will be made available to desktop users and offers a more modern and faster and more performant rendering engine.
@blauzahl: there are negative impacts that come with Calligra as well. nothing is "only positive", everything has strengths as well as challenges.
keeping in mind that i was not refering to the social or "how KDE handled it" side of the webkit saga, if we do wish to discuss that we should be intellectual honest with ourselves and realize that after the first set of insults the rest of the disfunction had a lot do with how KDE people decided to deal with it. (or, in some cases, ignore it hoping it would just work itself out.)
that we lost the attention of people like George S. who later goes on to sell his company to RIM and with that we lose access to several f/oss developers as a byproduct shows how many dominoes can fall in the "wrong" direction when we handle things with a lack of grace.
so there is a lesson to be learned there, and i hope we do not repeat them with Calligra. the first step of "doing the initial work in the open" has been successful, so already it is different on "how KDE is handling it" side. now we face various questions about embracing, adopting and interacting with the agendas of the companies that have placed themselves into the ring here.
however, in the blog post, i was strictly speaking to adoption rates and resulting robustness of Webkit and drawing parallels between where KHTML was then and KOffice is now. the technical parallel is pretty strong imho.
Post a Comment