Re: OO as GNOME software (topic change)

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> I think it's sort of a metaphysical question - like discussing the

I'm a philosophy major, what do you expect? ;-) The question was vague,
but intentionally so. Though I have a direct practical interest in
OpenOffice (I want them to use GTK+), I think the broader issue is more
interesting and more fair to consider, if more difficult.

As a thought example... Why do we not ship KDevelop in the gnome-extras
release? It is an excellent piece of software of high quality with
explicit support for creating GNOME applications (they have a GNOME
application wizard, though most features of KDevelop obviously aren't
geared towards developing GNOME apps). I am not arguing for KDevelop's
inclusion (nor against it), but I think the situation is fairly parallel
to that of OO.

The basic issue is that GNOME does have some amount of influence over
applications insomuch as it releases them as an official gnome package
(whether in an office release, an extras release, or of course as part
of the core platform). Sun has stated that they want OpenOffice to be
the GNOME office suite. Great! Terrific! But as much as I appreciate Sun
and their development efforts (many Sun hackers are doing lots of great
work on GNOME), including OO as part of the GNOME Office needs to be
more than just free publicity and marketing for Sun. When we release
something as part of GNOME we make an implicit statement that this is
software that supports the GNOME desktop and its user experience. This
is about standards. Insomuch as we are in a position to wield influence,
and it would be beneficial to the environment (and reasonable) to do so,
I think we should.

I do not think it is unreasonable to ask OO to produce a GTK+ version of
OO to be considered a GNOME application. I do not think this is an
unreasonable request to make of any program with a graphical interface
that wished to be included in a gnome release.

I think we do have implicit standards for inclusion of GNOME
software...for example I doubt anyone would seriously consider adding
Windows-only software to a gnome release. Say we thought a video editing
application was a critical missing piece in the GNOME environment, and
the only reasonable free software editing application was Windows-only.
Just because its free and we need that piece doesn't mean we ship
Win32VideoEdit as part of GNOME, or gnome-extras, or whatever. It should
be ported to GNOME first (a concept I cannot precisely define, but we
all probably have some intuitive notion of).

Now in our situation GNOME really does need a full-featured office
suite. OO is a great full-featured office suite. But just as in the
above example I think its going to need to be ported to be a part of the
gnome desktop. As it currently stands I would consider OO to be "generic
X-windows software" that still needs to be "ported to gnome". Otherwise
it makes the desktop environment disjunctive, and shouldn't really be
included as part of a gnome release.

So yes, its a meta-physical question, but I think its one that we should
figure out. Of course we need to be flexible, but it would be reasonable
if we had a general idea what our standards were for including software
in a GNOME release.

-seth

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