[GLLUG] Meeting Schedule and stuff

[Charles Ulrich]

Caleb Cushing wrote:
> I could help you with the openoffice / koffice topic. base sucks as bad 
> as access I think ;-). 

Far worse, actually. Access is evil but mostly capable within its design 
limits. Base is just a collosal blunder. I know the OO team had to start 
somewhere with their database component, but they should have at least 
waited until they had something halfway usable.

> and koffice is much better than open office in my 
> opinion (except for a few bugs). unless someone can give me a reason why 
> it isn't.

Well, I'm not going to try to start an argument about which one is 
better than the other. I've used both and I do like them both, but 
KOffice has two significant strikes against it:

1) OpenOffice has lots of additional features that cater to those coming 
from MS Office. This doesn't matter much to me or probably many others 
on this list, but it matters to most people.

2) KOffice only runs under KDE.

Number 1 might change over time, or it might not. Number 2 *should* 
change once the bulk of KDE is running fine on Qt4, which is GPL. In 
particular, the KDE frameworks and applications can be legally 
distributed for use on closed source operating systems like Windows. We 
should see KOffice, Konqueror, and their friends running happily (and 
natively) on Windows and OS X within a couple years. I may have read 
somewhere that the KDE 4 release would have an official Windows build. 
(Just don't quote me on any of this as I'm going from memory and my 
memory isn't known to be completely accurate...)

-- 
Charles Ulrich
Ideal Solution, LLC -- http://www.idealso.com