Re: Minutes of the GNOME Foundation Board meeting 12 December 2000

[Christian Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

On 13 Dec 2000 18:38:26 +0100, Daniel Veillard wrote:

> 
> - what to say to the AbiWord and other office hackers people about the
>   office suite
>   + we have in the past replaced applications with better versions
>   + there is no exclusivity about office software in Gnome, multiple
>     Office may actually fits different needs.


I am having trouble seeing why the GNOME Foundation should even consider
embracing SO (Star/Open Office) at the moment. The current set of
applications, including Abiword and Gnumeric actually integrates and
more integration is being worked on.  SO on the other hand has no
integration, and the SO developers seems lukewarm at best to doing any
real work to intergrate their suite with GNOME.
Correct me if I am mistaken but the current GNOME/SO integration status
is as follows (based on my intepretation of the few mails the SO hackers
has seem fit to honor us with):
a) Port to Gtk -> not considered at priority, if someone does it in
their spare time it will be considered.
b) Port to Bonobo -> might happen if bonobo is rewritten to look exactly
like the SO component model, but even then most likely not. More
probably writting some kind of wrappers will be the solution, but even
that is not yet decided.
c) General use of GNOME integrative technologies (completly uniteresting
unless done by volunteers, if so it must be highly optional since SO
needs to run of Unix plattforms which GNOME doesn't (like they exist
except in the fictional world of SO developers)

With such a ringing edorsement by SO I am having trouble seeing why
GNOME should bother recomending this stuff to anyone. Unless the
attitude of the SO people changes the only people I recommend using it
are people who don't mind waiting 30 minutes pr. hour for their Office
applications to respond to their keyboard input.

diplomatically yours,
Christian