Why I love(d) Krita to be part of Calligra (was: Re: After 2.9.7)

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Long mail :-) Sven already said a lot of what I wanted to say. The thing
is, with KOffice 2.0, we actually got further along the road to making
fine-grained composite document possible. We got further than Apple,
IBM or Microsoft with projects like Taligent, Opendocs or OLE. Sure, we
made architectural mistakes, but to very large extent, the result works.

With Calligra Gemini you can already combine hand-written annotations
with your document, for instance.

There are just two gotchas: the first is that for all of that, Krita's
specific strengths aren't needed, but on the other hand, a lot of
ballast. There are at least two image filter implementations in Calligra
next to Krita's, and those are more suited for compound documents,
for instance.

The other is that the users aren't there. It was a grand vision, and
one that's really attractive to software developers, but users care
about one thing: getting the job done asap, so they can quit the word
processor and go back to doing their real work. And they're right.

That's another difference between Krita and office applications. Office
applications, unless you happen to be a novelist, support doing work, are
not tools to do the actual work. You use krita to produce the deliverable
you send to a customer, you use Words to create the accompanying invoice.

And that might just be the reason, not just for all the problems finding
contributors to the office software, but even for finding motivation
and time to actually make the projects big and well known.

Even now, even this year, reviews of Linux office software will say of
Calligra, "promising, interesting, might become something with work",
which is exactly what they said in 2005.

Finally, Calligra has been a success, has been used in half a dozen
mobile products, with hundreds of thousands of users, but to continue 
being a success we need someone as crazy about Calligra as Michael Meeks
is crazy about Libre Office.

Boudewijn

Who still feels really bad :-(