There is another, somewhat independent issue that has occurred to me.
What about how the components are split up? The issues are somewhat
different for windows and mac than they are for linux.
For windows and mac, if someone, for instance, only wants a database
program, should they have to download the entire program suite just to
install that one program? There are a couple possible solutions to
this (in addition to the status quo). One is that we supply the
current all-inclusive installer, as well as a separate installers for
the individual parts.
I don't know how modular OOo or LibO are at this point but for a
quite some time it was and still is known to me that the core of
LibO/OOo is the biggest part of the Office and the "stand alone"
app would require to download this core and its own modules meaning
that if you install say Draw, Writer and Impress you would have to
install the core three times plus three times additional module
specific additions and therefore you need more disk space in the
end then you will save by not installing a monolith OOo.
So I see two tasks here.
Task 1: Make OOo less monolith so that you can have small stand
alone applications
Task 2: Find a proper way to distribute and install them.
An alternative is that we provide an online installer, where you
download a small program, tell it what you want to install, and it
retrieves those bits and installs them. This also has the advantage
that the actual download the user has to worry about deleting later is
very small, the rest of the downloads would be stored in a temporary
directory that would be automatically deleted later.
Very bad idea. I know a lot of end-users that are quite frustrated
by the fact that they don't own the application they bought on a
physical medium and have to re download it time and time again and
that sometimes the company even tells them that they reached their
maximum download and/or activations and that they now have to call
this number or even send their bill to certify they bought the
software. I know that we don't have those behavior but we would
make the user believe that we are no better than the big money
companies.
In addition I know that most of us are used to fast internet
connections with a lots of bandwidth but this isn't the case when
you go out into the wild even here in germany are lots of places
were DSL 1000 is the fastest you can get and try to install an
whole office only via the net if you are on such a machine. You
want the whole package which you download at your company, ask a
friend to download and burn on a CD or give it to you on an usb
stick.
Also think of the older computers out there very slow to install
applications and even though they are capable of going online
installing e.g. the new Acrobat reader on such an older computer
takes its while. I just had to deal with this and now it wasn't an
option to use a free PDF reader because the form that needed to
fill out was only shown and capable of being filled out correct in
Adobe Reader.
Eric
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