Why don't the development teams for KDE, as well as other large open source projects, focus on whet their core area is, and pass off the other stuff to development teams that are clearly doing a great job in their areas.
For the most part, that is exactly what KDE does.
Specifically I mean Evolution vs. Kontact, and Openoffice vs. Koffice.
Well, kontact, or at least the components of kontact, are a lot older then Evolution.
So, it's not like the kdepim developers are developing an alternative for evolution, i'ts the other way around
Same with openoffice: koffice is about 3 years older then openoffice (if you don't count the years of staroffice, the proprietary suite openoffice is based on).
I don't mean to imly anything negative to the KDE team or theis work. It's just that Open Office rocks so much, it seem that you could help the open source community more by not developing koffice an more, and devote those resources to either helping the OO team, or working on other more core areas of KDE. Same thought with Kontat, although I am impressed with it's current state.
I think you should not consider KDE as being 1 development team that is creating software, like you would consider microsoft or apple as being 1 development team.
Think of KDE as a software platform that programmers can use to develop their applications upon, just like Windows and MacOS are platforms which developers can use to build applications for.
If you look at kde-apps.org, you wil find about 1000 projects that are creating software based on the kde platform. Allmost all of them being independent projects that are only connected to each other through using KDE as a development platform (just like evolution and kontact are connected because they are developed for unix systems, or MS Office and Norton Utilities are connected because they use windows).
The main benefit of developing for the kde platform (besides being easy
) is that your application will be consistent with the rest of the environment and will integrate very well with other applications on your desktop.
That was also the main goal of kde when the project started: to provide an easy to use and consistent user environment that could challenge similar desktops, like MS Windows (before KDE, every application was using its own platform, own toolkitt etc, all behaving differently, making it impossible to do even the most simple interactions like copy & paste text between two different applications).