Re: redifining GNOME office.

["Thilo Pfennig" <thilopfennig foresightlinux org>]

On 4/4/07, Quim Gil <qgil gnome org> wrote:

 

IMveryHO trying to marketing-wise (re)build a concept of GNOME Office
to compete against OOo is even more futile than putting energies into
beating Firefox's success with Epiphany.

We have very limited energies, we better concentrate them in the
critical areas where the free software offer needs us most.

If we are not convinced about GNOME who else should we convince. Why are we doing this? This sounds like we are not really trying to convince anybody that GNOME should be their desktop.

We neither want to cooperate too much nor do we want to provide a full desktop solution (this would include a usable desktop). So we are going nowhere. I can't tell anybody to use Abiword and Gnumeric iof there is not really a strong support for these applications and the general idea of a GNOME based Office. I then MUST tell my customers to use KDE or OpenOffice.org instead because I don't want to see my customers having to do costly switches of platforms just because GNOME takes on a hobbyist approach without a professional ambition?

I have not recommended Abiword so far to my customers because OO.org is just providing much more NOW. If we only see GNOME as a desktop für interaction with hardware etc. I think this really does not help users very much because they then have to use non-GNOMish applications who follow other philosophies to do their tasks. And also GNOME is not THAT different. Sending attachments via Nautilus to Thunderbird does not work. We CAN indeed work on those "bugs". But neither Mozilla.org nor OpenOffice.org are or will be GNOME - so we will se a lot of costly integration issues.

I really think that KDEs approach to work on KDE Office makes much more sense - and if asked what viable alternative to huge OpenOffice.org they should use I should not recommend Abiword or Gnumeric if these do not get the support of the GNOME community.

I really think that Office application and integration is THE core point of desktop development. We win or loose on this point. So giving up the GNOME Office idea altogether for me sounds like: forget about GNOME.

To say it positive what GNOME is or should be from my view:
I would expect GNOME to be my desktop - there should be concepts to help me as a user to fulfill  my tasks which are things like: working with files, photos, sound, financial data, letters, graphics. This all should go smoothly and there should not be any issues with the interaction.


Neither OO nor FF will focus on integrating with either of GNOME or KDE. These are cross-platform applications that Maybe it would even make much more sense for OO to write a desktop of its own to be integrated better. Same is true for Mozilla.

I suppose you think that your proposition would mean more effectiveness of the GNOME organisation. But I think that giving up the idea of a GNOME Office makes GNOME less attractive to users and is indeed counterproductive. Sorry for being so blunt, but I think its better to do it this way as to think one way and talk another.

I also see that with the diminishing power of GNOME we see distributions making their own steps. We even see bugs of Distribution X beeing issued into Bugzilla, reducing GNOME more and more to just some kind of common subversion base of different distributions. Also funny to see some disttributions in fact offering additional commercial applications as a bugfix inside Bugzilla :-( .

I think GNOME could and should be more than the sum of its individual parts. I did not follow GNOME culture from its beginning. For me it looks like culture is decreasing and more tasks that GNOME should do are done my distributions where in fact I think really distributions should not be that important. You COULD switch distributions while keeping a GNOME desktop. But switching a desktop is nothing one really should want to do.

I don't see why we should do GNOME marketing at all if what you say is the rough consensus. If GNOME really is just some SVN repository and some geeky events and projects I don't see any need to coordinate or market. Then it does not matter anyway if things really work because no one really will stick to or depend on GNOME. If I expect nothing from an application I don't use it. I have switched to FLOSS in 1998 because I was willing to accept substandard software because its free and because of its potential. The projects I most likely will not be able to use in the future because they can not take up with the development are not really what a user should choose.

If we at Foresight would have thought like that we would not have chosen Epiphany as its default application. We should tell people why they should want to use GNOME or gnomish applications instead of other options. 

I hope we are getting more ambitious.

Thilo
-- 
Thilo Pfennig
http://issues.foresightlinux.org/confluence/x/R