Integrative work

[Ralf Nolden]

Hi,

if someone missed the point about the current events of the last weeks: Our 
job is now to correct any impression KDE is making to the outside world that 
if someone would want to use KDE, he would be tied to one toolkit and one 
development environment. 

We have to make clear that we do have the power and the force, together with 
our technologies, to be an *integrative* factor, not one that needs to create 
its own application set just because we beleive that it's the right solution 
in the long run. Here, we have to think short term while we can still 
preserve projects like KOffice to be developed _over time_ to become a speedy 
and functional replacement of OpenOffice. Until then things like KOffice are 
_research_ projects, alternatives to test our technologies like Kparts. 

The keyword is: create mindshare by code that KDE can integrate:

- OpenOffice.org
- Mozilla
- GTK/ other toolkits based applications

into KDE as seamless as possible. We cannot deny reality the right to dictate 
us that sometimes we have to do things that we do not always like to do. To 
cite Michael Gorbatchev: He who comes late gets punished by life. It should 
be our way to realize that people tend to think of us as the 
everything-has-to-be-KDE-or-we-won't-use-it crowd and that we have to do a 
good job right now to make sure this impression gets corrected and we are the 
driving factor with regard to uniting both our goal to provide a HIG based, 
easy to use desktop with a bunch of useful apps that is _at the same time_ 
*the* desktop that is able to run and integrate any application out there.

One way to do that is to make those apps use our filedialog and printdialog 
(printing does work in most cases, filedialog is a research project people 
should look at and maybe make proposals how to change gtk to call the kde 
file dialog, patches welcome for demo.

Alex Neundorf is working on the OOo/gtk side, so please contact him if you 
want to be of help, he really needs hands helping him with this particular 
project.

The other way is to check out the cool things that are happening at 
freedesktop.org which is in particular the organization that will support us 
with any integrative work, may it be themes, styles, settings and new 
features in X. 

Ralf
-- 
We're not a company, we just produce better code at less costs.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Ralf Nolden
nolden at kde.org

The K Desktop Environment       The KDevelop Project
http://www.kde.org              http://www.kdevelop.org
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