Re: Question to candidates: what about next ODF?

["Gregory Leblanc" <headmaster albus dumbledore gmail com>]

Just a couple of comments, see below.

On Nov 28, 2007 8:06 PM, Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org> wrote:
>   Around the time of the establishment of the GNOME Foundation, the GNOME
>   community (under much clearer leadership at the time than we have now)
>   basically ceded all office/productivity development to OpenOffice.org,
>   with the idea at the time being that OpenOffice.org would be ported to
>   GNOME and become, if not in name then certainly in implementation, "GNOME
>   Office".

While this is all technically true, I think it's somewhat misleading,
based on my recollections, and what I could find in a brief browse of
the mailing list archives.
There was much clearer leadership in the community then, but I do not
believe that the community came to a conclusion that we would cede
development of a GNOME office to OpenOffice.org.  My impression of
what happened was more that the community never got a cohesive and
self-sustaining effort going to make a GNOME Office suite happen.
Hopefully it doesn't sound like I'm picking nits here.

> The dudes who work on the GTK+/GNOME AbiWord frontend are certainly involved
> in the GNOME community, Jody has his little team working on Gnumeric, the
> GNOME-DB team are largely focused on their platform stuff now, Glom is not
> totally associated with "GNOME Office" but is looking very promising as a
> database component, and a few projects have popped up here to do things like
> presentations without getting very far -- but none of these have really had
> the primary support of distributions or the GNOME community in general for a
> while now. We don't even have a GNOME Office release suite to ship every six
> months (not for lack of encouragement or trying though).
>
> So although there will be a few people up in arms if I describe this as a
> "storm in a teacup", what do they seriously think we have to gain by making
> *political* statements about ODF or OOXML when it's not massively relevant
> to the GNOME community in the first place? If the GNOME Foundation made a
> profound statement on the legitimacy of OOXML, it would be about as helpful
> as a flame from some random commenter on a news website. Given that, on the
> whole, we are not office/productivity software practitioners, our *political
> opinions* on those issues don't carry a lot of weight. So why should we be
> pushed or bullied into making them?
>
> What's relevant here is that we have helped a member of the GNOME community
> to achieve his aims in support of his work on Free Software, and that there
> is legitimate disagreement about whether that demonstrates *passive* support
> for an unpopular company and format. We don't think that's the case, but we
> accept differing opinions on the matter. Other commentators have been less
> tolerant in this regard, and that is disappointing.

Well said!  Thank you.
      Greg