Those crazy kids at KOffice have created a simplified version of their office suite especially geared for kids. A cool feature, though, is that it’s fully interoperable with the “adult” version of the suite, so teachers/parents can open documents created by students/kids and vice versa. Nice.
open… has some nice thoughts on the role of open source in a process like this:
These are precisely the kind of innovations that free software makes so easy: hacking together a quick prototype and then polishing it. Let’s hope that other simplified versions follow, since an “Easy” Office would be useful far beyond its original target market, education.
It would also be a nice riposte to never-ending complexification of Microsoft’s own products, which are forced to add more and more obscure features – whether or not users what them – in a desperate attempt to justify yet another paid-for upgrade. Free software is under no such pressure, and can therefore downgrade applications when that might appropriate, as here. Microsoft, by contrast, is trapped by its ratchet-based business model.
