Re: What is GNOME office?

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

The beauty of free software is that anyone can start or fork a project.
Therefore, I'm sure there will always be multiple wordprocessors, spreadsheets
etc.

However, the truth of the matter is that GNOME currently lacks a competitive
productivity suite.   When I read discussions on our mailing lists on this
topic, I often wonder if the people in the flamewars actually use productivity
software on a daily basis.   While there are many interesting discussions to be
had about the technical superiority of one product over another, I feel that we
sometimes ignore the end-user needs, specifically the importance of complete
feature-sets and the ability to exchange documents with Windows and Macintosh
users.

We need to face the fact that we don't have a competitive productivity suite,
that it's a *major* hurdle in our move to make GNOME *the* free desktop of
choice, and agree to focus our energies on deliver ONE kick-butt suite that
includes a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, presentation package, charting tool,
painting program, personal organizer suite, maybe web-browser.  And I know this
is a controversial item, but I do think that the wordprocessor, spreadsheet and
presentation packages should be primarily built on the OpenOffice code base.

Bart




Daniel Veillard wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 15, 2000 at 08:29:00AM -0600, Mike Kestner wrote:
> > Daniel Veillard wrote:
> >
> > >   Do you speak for one of those companies ? If no please abstain putting
> > > words in their mouth, if yes can you be more precise about the company's
> > > your are speaking for ?
> >
> > No, as the your message implies, I have no corporate affiliations
> > related to GNOME.  I don't believe I made any statements that fall
> > outside the realm of common sense.  Is it your position as a newly
> > elected board member that I abstain from stating what I consider to be
> > common sense?
>
>   No. It's Daniel Veillard reacting to person A saying that person B
> think something evil. I'm just stating my personal disliking of such
> rethoric, and asking for clarification in case I missed something.
> In the case of a company it's even more difficult to guess their
> "intent".
>   Considering common sense, it's your appreciation obviously, another
> common sense until recently was that large organizations kept their
> code jealously secret because it was their best interest. Seems it's
> not always the case today, and I would rather give them credit for
> changing than suggesting they have an evil plan.
>   Anyway my experience with those large companies is that you may
> know what an individual working for this company thinks but it's
> difficult to generalize.
>   My personal viewpoint is that rationale discussion can only be based
> on facts. Starting a discussion based on the opinion on what someone else
> is thinking is mostly politics, and I would rather keep this low volume.
>
> Daniel
>
> --
> Daniel Veillard w3 org | W3C, INRIA Rhone-Alpes  | libxml Gnome XML toolkit
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