Re: StarOffice as idea source

[robert havoc pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On 27 Apr 1998, Paul Seelig wrote:
>
> I'm sorry to say that, but i consider StarOffice a complete failure.
>

Yes, it's bloated and alien. That's because it's cross-platform, among
other things. It mostly looks like Windows on all platforms.

I don't mean that Gnome should copy everything. I mean that StarOffice is
the *functional* equivalent of Gnome; Gnome should allow the same tasks
that StarOffice does, with equal ease. I mention StarOffice over other
office suites first because it's free to download, so anyone can try it
and get ideas; second because they've replaced the entire native platform,
so StarOffice is more of a complete environment than other office suites.

There are things worth copying in it. It's a technical monstrosity, and
like most proprietary software not written by the OS vendor suffers from
lack of integration with the environment and minimal code reuse, in this
case exacerbated by the cross-platform business. Nonetheless, it's the
best thing going for novice users now. If I was going to ask my mom to use
Linux, I'd install StarOffice.

*Functionally*, it's very much what Gnome should be going for, IMO. We
want to do that, only better. It's a big task, though.

We get the "better" for free, because the open-source nature of Gnome
means any reusable code can be moved to gnome-libs, and the distribution
model of Linux means everything will be beautifully integrated by Red Hat
and Debian. So don't worry about alien bloatware. What does need worrying
about is usability and non-hacker appeal.

Havoc Pennington
http://pobox.com/~hp