Hello Christian
On 02/02/2005, you wrote:
Hi,
thanks for your willingness to answer some questions. So off we go:
- Mr Ochal, please introduce yourself to our readers. What has been
your role in the Amiga community so far?
Well, as you know, my name is Christophe Ochal, also known as Amon_Re on various websites, my involvement with the Amiga goes back a long time, in the early nineties i think, and i was involved, amongst others, with the Belgian Amiga club 'Waaslandia'. During this involvement i have aided in Amiga shows in Germany, United Kingdom and Belgium.
My role in those days was mostly technical (repairs and such).
After the collapse of Amiga's second coming, and the removal of Jim Collas, the club did collapse, and my activity was reduced greatly, thankfully, i never lost my fascination with AmigaOS.
It was only when Hyperion announced that they were going to do AmigaOS 4 that my involvement with the community picked up again, and now i'm doing my best to support the community in any way i can.
The things i am doing are:
- http://amigadev.amigaworld.net A support site for Amiga developers where they can find documentation and help from other developers, this site is simular to utilitybase, and me and Nicolas get along great, there's no power struggle involved ;) - OpenOffice.org: This is the big one, it's probably the largest open source effort ever on our platform, hopefully we can pull it off. - GCC installers and tools This is a simple GeekGadgets installer suite.
- Who had initially the idea of porting OpenOffice to the AmigaOS
Well, OpenOffice for AmigaOS has been a fantasy for many people, dating back to several years ago, but the recent activity was started by EnthilZa (Thomas Frieden) in a thread on amigaworld.net.
From there on we took the initiative, and we got the ball rolling
environment? Who is involved and what role are Hyperion Entertainment playing who announced the project on www.amiga-news.de? How many people were you able to recruit to actively support this project?
Hyperion is more or less involved through the fact that OS4 and OOo share common coders, other then that there is no active involvement from Hyperion.
We have over 70 people on the mailinglist, but at this moment most work is being done by a smaller team.
I am involved as Project Manager, Peter Bengtsson is working on porting NAS (one of OOo's dependencies), Mark Bond is helping out with Project Management, Ole-Egil Hvitmyren is managing the mailinglist, aswell as hosting the OOo sources, Paul Heams is putting the finishing touches to his ASPELL port (another OOo dependency) Henning Nielsen Lund is also helping out with various build related tools, Tony Wyatt is working on Berkely DB (another dependency) and Andy Hall is working on porting SANE, a scanner API.
- OpenOffice is HUGE. Considering the fact that other large software
projects like Amizilla or even Amiga OS 4 itself are progressing fairly slowly: When will we see first results? Is this project feasible at all? Will we see a full implementation of OOo or will it be a "light" version of the package?
The biggest part are all the dependencies, these need to be resolved before anything else can be done, as for making a "light" version, i don't think that's intresting.
As for a time frame, it's impossible to give any guess, the work is huge, and we all have dayjobs, so it won't happen over night, so i guess it'll "when it's done".
This is one of the reasons why we are targetting the more usefull dependencies first (like SANE and ASPELL), this will be usefull for the community, and will help us gain momentum and possibly even some extra coders.
- Will OpenOffice for Amiga OS4 be Open Source just like all other OOo
ports and available for free for all Amiga users? How is development financed?
There is no financing asof yet, we are all doing this without the intent of making any money out of it. The port will be free, as it is on all platforms, and the sources will remain open. Hosting of the site was kindly donated to us by David Doyle, and the sources will be hosted on http://www.sf.net
- What do your plans look like for the port? What project phases and
steps do you anticipate? What does the timeline look like?
We are still working on going through the sources, trying to figure out how everything fits together, and some ports have already been started (ASPELL, SANE, NAS), basicly, what needs doing is this:
- Examine all known & unknown dependencies - Examine available ports of said dependencies if they exist - Port the remaining dependencies - Recreate the build environment for eighter cross compilation or native - Port the remaining code - Debug
This is a rough sketch of the work envolved, and several steps can be done in parrallel.
There currently is no timeline.
- OOo relies partially on other technologies that AmigaOS 4 currently
doesn't have, e.g. Java. How do you cope with the OSes limitations?
We are communicating weekly with the Jamiga team, and will also investigate kaffe. Luckally, OOo can be used without java, although some features won't work without it.
- Does this project make sense since we have quite good office related
applications already available on the Amiga (Papyrus Office and Pagestream to name to most prominent)?
OOo is in no way any competition for Papyrus and Pagestream, at this time it's best considered vapourware, it'll take alot of work to port it, and waiting for us to finish makes no sense.
Thank you very much for answering these questions. I'd be greatful if you could write short paragraphs rather than just answering "yes" or "no". I will need to translate your answers into German after I receive them (unless you speak German yourself and would be able to answer directly in German language).
The whole article including this interview is planned to be published in the next AmigaFuture issue.
Best regards Christian Krenner
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Christophe Ochal [mailto:ochal@kefren.be] Gesendet: Montag, 31. Januar 2005 20:04 An: Christian Krenner Betreff: Re: Interview for AmigaFuture magazine
Hello Christian
Dang, this makes it sound even more official now ;) Sure, i'm willing to awnser your questions, it's not that i have something to hide, just don't look in that closet behind me...
Can not promise a swift reply tho, busy week shedule this week.
On 31/01/2005, you wrote:
Dear Mr Ochal,
I received your email address from Thomas Frieden at Hyperion. I am writing a report about the OpenOffice for Amiga OS4 project for the German "AmigaFuture" print magazine and was wondering if you were willing to answer a few questions regarding that project. Thomas Frieden told me that you were project leading this project.
Please let me know if you agree, I will then send you a couple of questions by email. Of course please feel free to reconfirm
this with
the editor in chief of AmigaFuture, Andreas Magerl (andreas@amigafuture.de).
Thank you very much in advance!
Best regards Christian Krenner christian@amigafuture.de
Regards
Amon_Re Christophe Ochal Hoge Buizemont 168 9500 Geraardsbergen, Belgium Mobile: 0032 (0)479/46 45 74 http://www.kefren.be http://www.metalfest.be
Regards