[svlug] StarOFfice to be GPL'd, integrated with Gnome

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 20 Jul 2000 12:20:10 -0700 
Karen Shaeffer <shaeffer at best.com> wrote:

> GNOME should be designed to facilitate the creation and
> maintenance of IPC channels between an arbitrary number of core
> utilities, and, of course, controlled by the user. This
> architecture facilitates ease of maintenance and is completely
> open to innovation.

To a man with a hammer everything is a nail.  Monolithic program
design makes for very big and impressive hammers and implies nice
big nails as well (no jokes about dick waving please).  Heavily
abstracted componenet program design builds bits, lots and lots of
little bits, each of which is a little special case hammer -- which
tends to suggest that all the nails are lttle tiny nails as well.

You don't want a tool that does everything.  You don't want a
desktop that does everything.  You don't want an OS that does
everything.  You want a tool that does one thing well and knows how
to play nicely with other tools that also do their one thing well
and know how to play nicely with other tools that also do their one
thing well and know how to play nicely with other tools that also do
their one thing well and know how to play nicely with other tools
that also do their one thing well...ad infinitum.

Its the equivalent of teaching a man to fish.  You don't give him a
fish and you don't give him a fully equipped deep sea trawler, you
give him the education to build fishing equipment and all the rest
of his tackle, and the knowledge of how to use it.

-- 
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                               Other: coder at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/        Keys etc: finger claw at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--