Symphony or OO

Orion

Anyone tried Symphony yet? It says that you require RH or SLED but I assume it'll work on Ubuntu as well. I'm most likely going to install SLED on my laptop anyway to try it out so worst case I can test it then.

One thing I can't find out - is Symphony free as in freedom or it is free as in beer?

It does look nice tho. I may try it out as it seems to have features that I wish OO.o did. But if it's an attempt to outdo OO.o it could have a negative impact overall.

croo

I hadn't looked at symphony because I'd read a very bad review that said it was very sluggish. Perhaps you can let us know if this is not correct?
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/137545/ibms_symphony_hitting_wrong_notes_reviewers_say.html

On the topic it of it being an attempt to out do OO.o... according to the link above it's a fork from 1.1.4 (which would explain the sluggishness). But I have been reading recently that while OO.o is open source, to maintain complete control over the code and thereby be able to relicense if they choose, SUN (who control OO.o) have not been accepting patches or enhancements from anybody who is not SUN! Rather than accept patches (licensed LGPL as OO.o is) SUN are reproducing patches themselves on occasion asking the help from those who wished to submit patches but not attributing the fix to them! Not very Open Source if you ask me .... more a case of looking for free debuggers.

A group led by a Novell engineer, while are claiming they have not forked OO.o, have created "Go OO" is really OO.o with those patches SUN won't accept. But it's not a fork.... it's a community build

Now Novell are not without their critics (myself included) either after their MS deal but it's worrying to see the big commercial entities in the OS world (most new to it mind) SUN, IBM & Novell wasting resources competing against each other instead of the true competitor in the field... MS. It's also worrying that for all their OS talk SUN obviously place a value on their code ("asset") which is, I believe, a concept alien to OS which says people and the service they provide is the real asset while code is basically information to be shared.

Anyway I will continue OO.o for now but will keep a close eye on Go OO... and do let us know how symphony works out!

croo

on the topic of SUN accepting contribution from none SUN developers this is an interesting read
http://kohei.us/2007/10/02/history-of-calc-solver/

Orion

Well I installed it and uninstalled it the same day. Looks very pretty but slow as a graveyard. I might revisit it again someday when they sort it out.