Well, only a soft freeze, not hard yet. But that means that we won’t add new features to KOffice anymore that haven’t yet been announced in our feature plan. And those features, even though in the plan, that haven’t been at least a little credibly implemented by September 16th won’t make the cut for 2.0.
What does that mean? Well, our blogs will become a lot more boring. We’ll be doing more and more stabilisation work. And more and more bug fixing. And more and more smoothing out of wrinkles. And more and more things no-one can interpret as a “promise”, even though it’s only the enthusiastic articulation of a developer in the heat of the hunt.
On the other hand, we’ve been working on KOffice 2.0 since 2006. That’s right — we started porting KOffice to Qt4 and KDE4 March 27th, 2006. And it’s no denying the road has been gruelling. Really, I totally grok the GTK people who don’t want an api break for GTK 3.0. On the other hand, unless GTK gets gingered up a lot, any GTK app will be too nineties for words in a year or two.
And moving an app over to a new API is only the beginning. Frictions among KOffice developers, chasing the taillights of kdelibs, Qt4 that wasn’t really as excellent as it should have been until 4.3, personal things like job or house changes, an increase in bad manners among the general public (although I remember saying the dot wasn’t any fun anymore in 2006 already). Sometimes the fun and excitement was hard to find. And now we’re in boring stabilisation mode again…
And I’m still worried about sustainability. I worry whether it’s possible to write world class office software with more or less one part-time coder per application. Especially when that part-time aspect gets eroded by days jobs. That is why it’s so great that NLnet sponsors us, with money for logos and money for Girish Ramakrishnan to really focus on some issues. But we really need more people!
You don’t need to know C++ — we can teach you that, no problem. And despite the aforementioned frictions we’re a nice bunch of people, really. And we’re pretty patient with questions. We cannot promise money or riches, but we can guarantee fame and fun! And we’re committed — we’l go on and on, alpha after alpha until we have something we dare call a beta — and then we’ll go on and on until we’ve got a release candidate.
