KOffice

» see koffice.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

KOffice was on my machines the way a road you never drive on is on your map. Anybody who installed a Linux distribution in the mid-2000s got it, because KDE was the default desktop on most of what circulated in Turkey and KOffice was what KDE put in the office slot. I opened KWord a handful of times, decided it was not going to open the.doc files university actually ran on, and went back to whatever would. That is roughly the story of the whole product.

It started in 1997 with Reginald Stadlbauer writing KPresenter, KWord following in 1998, and the assembled suite shipping on 23 October 2000 alongside K Desktop Environment 2.0. Nine components eventually: word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, vector drawing, diagrams, project planning, a database front end and, for a while, Krita. Everything used OpenDocument natively before that was a common thing to say.

It also had one strange moment of importance. In 1999, Microsoft's Paul Maritz cited KOffice from the witness stand in the United States antitrust trial as evidence that competition in operating systems and office suites was alive. A KDE side project with a handful of contributors got entered into the record as proof that Microsoft had rivals.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the split ~

KOffice 2.0 arrived in 2009 rebuilt on the KDE 4 libraries, and the team labeled it a platform release for testers and developers rather than something to keep your documents in. Several applications simply were not in it. For over a year afterward, the honest advice from the developers to anyone with real work was to stay on the 1.6 series from 2006, which is a difficult thing for a project to have to say about its own current version.

Then in mid-2010 the community came apart over disagreements between the KWord maintainer, Thomas Zander, and the rest of the core developers. Arbitration followed, and the outcome was that almost everyone left. Calligra took the developers, and it took Krita and Kexi outright, along with the work on mobile. KOffice kept the name and Zander, and renamed the applications it no longer shared, so KSpread became KCells and KPresenter became Showcase. A fork usually splits a project. This one hollowed out one side and left the shell standing with the original brand on it.

The last release with both teams working on it was 2.3, on 31 December 2010, and the 2.3.3 bugfix followed in early 2011. There is no 2.4. Calligra went on to 2.4 and 2.5 and further; KOffice put out an announcement dated 24 June 2011 about a stable release with no new features, and that announcement stayed at the top of the front page until the front page stopped existing.

~ i like white empty spaces ~

Development activity stops in mid-March 2012, apart from two minor commits that August. Through 21 August the site was still a WordPress install describing an integrated office suite, KCells for spreadsheets and Showcase for presentations, with a news column whose most recent item was fourteen months old.

The next capture is 9 September 2012, and it is three hundred bytes. No doctype, no html element, no head, no body. The entire document served at koffice.org is a single h4 tag reading "I like white empty spaces". Somebody deleted the site and left that behind. On 22 October KDE removed KOffice from its Quality Website Tools, and by 2014 the project was formally listed as unmaintained.

It got worse before it stopped. By August 2013 the address was returning an Apache error page reading "Site Temporarily Unavailable" with the error id bad_httpd_conf, which is the message a webserver gives when nobody is left to configure it. Today koffice.org answers over plain http with a redirect to calligra.org, so the domain has been handed to the people who walked out. The KDE 3 version is still maintained, in the Trinity desktop project, by people keeping a 2006 codebase compiling for its own sake.

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