KDE-PI: Naming concepts and a meaningful end

Hello, Planet!

Calligra is now the new KDE office suite. No problem when a project starts to rethink its concepts and try to engange more efforts to make things better. I wrote a article a month ago about my vision of the internal problems in KOffice (if you wanna take a look, is in portuguese). Tryng to take seriously the Julian Assange definition of scientific journalism (GO,WIKILEAKS!), this email thread is the real source of information about the reasons why the KOffice is passing through a “rebranding”. Is not the end of the project, is just a reformulation.

I read a weird article associating the end of KOffice with the end of KDE. Brian Proffit, the author of the article, put some things that happened and try to predict another rebranding in KDE, and even try predict some names, like Plasma. I don’t blame Mr. Proffit about the misunderstanding, since probably he didn’t read projects objectives, the old “About” link in a webpage (ok, it’s his fault). We can see that the repercution of the article it wasn’t that good. To clarify, understand that KDE became a wider concept in FOSS projects it’s not that easy, since some people don’t seen through the community concept. And that’s the thing about Calligra issue.

If you read the KOffice devel list  thread, you will see that internal relationship problems have came up. You can’t be in a situation where you have to work with people and become isolated. We have to live with differences and learn to deal with it, in a project or in our personal life. In a project point of view, I’ll quote Seigo here:

“The biggest challenge laying ahead for the people working on Calligra is going to be building a healthy, dynamic community with real leadership around it and a coherent vision under it. In other words: the challenge is to tap the momentum before it dissipates to improve on the foundational issues that KOffice struggled with.“

The KDE name rebranding it was important for improve the vision of community that have to be strong in a dynamic enviroment such FOSS. But the modification was not in the name, but in the meaning. A better and wide concept was associated with the name “KDE”. Calligra is trying to do the same, but in a new name. If you look closely, most of the developers of KOffice are in the Calligra project. If you want to understand the reasons, see Cyrille Berger words about it.

I’m slowly entering the Calligra community and I can say that the people behind it are really receptive and helpful, so the intergatioin concept is becoming strong and will lead to a good result. Taking the Chico Xavier’s wise words, we can’t come back in time and make a new beginning, but we all can start over and make a better end.