Interview-200610

Interview questions on the collaboration b/w OOo and Moz's Lightning....

These qs. may take some time to answer... I tried to ask some non-obvious ones but I'm sure I missed the good and obvious ones. Feel free to propose those--and answer them :-)

thx, Louis

• Tell us who you are... who composes your group, what you do

• In Michael's roadmap presentation at OOoCon 2006 last month, he mentioned to an OOo Personal Information Manager (PIM) based on Lightning. Michael argued that this would "complete" OOo, as it would offer users a Calendaring, email, and address book solution, allowing a "complete migration to open solutions."

• Would this PIM be modular? That is, say a user didn't want to include it? And if it is modular, how would that work? Michael also suggested that there would later be Sun Java System Calendar Server support, as well as Microsoft Exchange support, and ultimately, the ability to sync with PDAs. This is great! Do the involved communities envision however the participation of other stakeholders in bringing these goals about? If so, where should aspiring developers go? That is, which project, OOo or Lightning?

• Lightning is still in the 0.1 stage... meaning that it needs a lot of work. How will this collaboration affect your plans? For instance, one thing that OOo has become famous for has been its advocacy of open standards. Lightning currently uses .sdb, as well as is able to work with the iCal standard, ics, which is open. Would you be interested in pushing to make this standard officially ratified by, say, OASIS or ISO? I ask this because I can envision in the near future enterprises and others using Exchange, Google Calendar, Mozilla and others and not necessarily able to communicate. As it stands today, ICal communicates fairly well with Exchange Calendar but not perfectly. Ideally, that should change, and data accessibility not dependent on application.

• Lightning uses an SQL-based storage mechanism based on SQLite, so the FAQ inform. At one point, OOo was considering using SQLite for its database component; we now use the Java-based HSQLDB. Would it make any difference to a user to use SQLite throughout? What would be required?

• FOSS has some procedural and pragmatic advantages over closed production; bugs, for instance, are more obvious and thus more easily addressable. Security is another point: Many security issues derive from unexamined code often legacy code. Others derive from a basic philosophical difference about how security should work. Do you see there being security issues related to this collaboration? [An explanation would be great....]

• OpenOffice.org has been accused, justly or no, of being difficult to work with, both as a project and as code. We've seriously improved the situation--see our wiki for developers, for instance--but it's best to look at specific instances, like this one. So: What technical and political problems were encountered? How were they resolved? What would you suggest be done going forward?

• This particular collaboration is also exciting because it hints at further collaborations b/w Mozilla and OOo. But in what areas? OOo is mainly a producer of by and large static documents, though they may have dynamic elements--spreadsheets, presentations, papers, etc. But the future lies in works that are collaborative produced and in which the consumer blurs into the producer. How do you see Mozilla working with OOo in those promising areas?

Other questions?

Thanks!

Louis louis[at]collab.net