On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 08:50:39PM -0800, Bart Decrem wrote:
> Jody Goldberg wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 07:46:38PM -0500, Michael Meeks wrote:
> > >
> > > Handing out 'you are not part of GNOME' notices to people because
> > > they have not yet integrated fully into the community[1] is not a good
> > > plan. Also, whilst the foundation defines what GNOME is, distributors
> > > define what people get, which I would imagine will include Open Office at
> > > whatever level of integration into GNOME it has.
> > >
> > > There are good technical reasons why OO does not use Gtk+, quite
> > > apart from the massive amount of code that would need to be changed.
> >
> > Handing out 'you are the official office suite for GNOME' notices
> > seems premature, and somewhat questionable.
>
> Yes, I think that would be premature and I kind of agree with Havoc: I'm not
> sure there's a need for "the 1 official GNOME suite".
Well, there's a web page, and in many people's minds there's a
concept, of GNOME office as a unified entity. GNOME could make the
decision that it doesn't care, and plans not to have an "official
GNOME suite". They could have a little GNOME menu that pops up
AbiWord and StarWriter, Gnumeric and StarCalc.
But that would be a decision that only GNOME, in the sense that it
determines what goes in the tarball, would make. Distributors (like
Ximian, and Eazel, and Red Hat, and everyone else) would make a
decision about which one to have as the default.
So GNOME as an organization has two choices: make a decision, which
will be unpopular with some people, or punt, and pretend that a
decision doesn't need to be made.
>
>
> > OO is a large project and once a stable release is made it will
> > probably make its way into most distributions. There is no need to
> > brand it as 'part' of GNOME. There are many projects that are
> > instrumental in providing a free software platform that are not, and
> > will not be an integral part of GNOME. Lets let them do their work
> > without tossing around unrequested notices. As OO's goals and
> > integration strategies are clarified we'll see what they'd like.
>
> Fair enough. Having said that, I have to use StarOffice on a daily basis
> because AbiWord and Gnumeric just don't (yet) have all the features and
> interoperability with the MS Office world that I need and I'm pretty excited
> to see the OO project come along. It's great that I can now run just the word
> processor or spreadsheet without needing that big ugly thing that wants to
> take over my desktop, and based on my test-drives and from what I hear, the
> 6.0 release will play with GNOME much more nicely than StarOffice 5.2
> currently does. So I do think that Open Office will be a really important
> factor in convincing new waves of GNOME users to jump on our bandwagon!
>
Well, curious that you mention working with MS documents. AbiWord, in
fact, has the best Word importer outside of MicroSoft products. And
I'm told Gnumeric does fairly well in this category as well.
However, on the larger point you make, yes, AbiWord and Gnumeric don't
have all the features of OO. But OO doesn't have all the features of
MS Office, which is what everyone measures all of these products
against anyway.
Now, it should be obvious why MS Word isn't in GNOME. But it does
show that features and MS compatibility aren't the only, or even the
most important, criteria for inclusion in GNOME office.
sam th
sam uchicago edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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