Re: What is GNOME office?

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com>]

Hello!

> Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com> writes: 
> > Seems that many guys have forgotten - OK, after all many of us are already
> > hired to work on Gnome - that one of the main goals of free software is
> > joy of programming and good community. And in that respect many otherwise
> > identical projects certainly are not interchangeable.
> 
> I do agree, but I don't think we can give up the technical quality of
> GNOME and the long-term success of free software in the
> process. There's certainly some tension there, and a fine balance to
> maintain.
> 
> I don't know - I've always been in it to make free software
> succeed. Personally I would not be involved in a project that was just
> a hobby that had no chance of having many users and didn't want to get
> more users. To me it's a lot more fun knowing that I'm working for a
> reason and that my work will be important.

I suggest everyoune to try to distinguish between 2 goals:
1) We want 'politically' conquer world desktops
2) We want to produce techincally best desktop in world
Current state of things seems to suggest, that they do not fit well
together. Techincal excellence just involves too much code rewrite and too
slow progress to compete with inferior products. And becoming the dominant
desktop creates huge backward-compatibility intertia.

So the situation seems to be lose-lose to me :(

Nevertheless, if I had to choose sides, I'd choose (2)
And according to my current best knowledge about state of affairs, choosing
(2) means Gnumeric, Abi & friends.

Lauris