Re: Decoupling GNOME Office?

[Jon Trowbridge <trow emccta com>]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2000 at 05:31:44PM -0700, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> If folks really think that tight integration is a prerequisite to
> releasing a bunch of apps as "GNOME Office" (and I don't -

I don't either.

> integration is one desirably feature in an office suite, but not a
> litmus test for releasing at all, IMO) we could simply drop the
> large apps from the GNOME release and release them all separately at
> about the same time as GNOME 1.4.

This makes sense.  We can call it a "GNOME Office" release, but that
is all semantics.  And if we are going to tack a version number on it,
I'd vote for a low number.  The lower the better.

Personally, I think that the "office suite" concept reflects a sort of
gigantism that is out of place in free software.  Proprietary apps
from different companies never seem to play nicely together; thus it
logically follows that you should buy all of your most-used apps in
one giant steaming lump from one vendor.  On the contrary, large,
well-designed free apps built on top of a nice platform like GNOME
should all work well together, even if they don't fall under the
rubric of any "suite".

Perhaps the lack of consensus on this issue is due to a lack of a
shared vision of exactly what GNOME Office *is*, besides being 
something we need to be able to say we have in order to compete with
non-free systems on the desktop.

Maybe this should all be moved to the gnome office list.  (Is there a
gnome office list?  I see gnome-workshop-list, but it basically has
never gotten any traffic...)

-JT

-- 
GNU/Linux: Free your mind and your OS will follow.