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

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> Basically what we said at the board meeting was that we shouldn't pick
> any official gnome anything, the more software the better, we are just
> going to include all the apps that are useful and good. There are
> clearly large groups of people that want both pieces of software, and
> so both are worth having.
> 

Everyone at the board meeting seems to have a different view. I'll
just state my personal opinion, not speaking on behalf of the board.

I believe GNOME should eventually release and officially label some
software as "GNOME Office". Identifying what software is part of GNOME
is one of the few tasks of the foundation specifically mentioned in
the charter.

It may eventually be desirable to pick more than one word processor,
or more than one spreadsheet or whatever.

However, as of right now, we have not picked even one, let alone more
than one. We have several promising candidates for some office suite
components - we have gnumeric and AbiWord, both of which have clean,
modern code bases and integrate well with GNOME, and we have
OpenOffice, which is much closer to being an MS Office equivalent in
terms of features, but which has far less GNOME integration currently.

It remains to be seen what programs will become both largely
feature-complete and well-integrated with GNOME, and therefore
ready for release as GNOME Office.

Whatever we do adopt in the end may well use technologies from
multiple sources.

 - Maciej