Re: [dev] GNOME Office and OpenOffice

[Klas Lindberg <klasa maestro hl lu se>]

Tjo!


> In my ideal world, the single resulting project would include both the
> historical StarOffice team and the historical AbiWord team, and the
> best code from all of StarOffice and AbiWord and Gnumeric and Guppi
> and so on.

Exactly my view. We should stay with our projects, make them -- or parts
of them -- good killers and then build consensus on what parts we want to
retain for a final GNOME Office suite.

>  - let's use gnome-office-list gnome org for now to discuss these issues
>    and plan future direction.

While I think this is necessary, we must not forget that most of us will
probably keep a specific project closest to heart. For me, that will imply
mostly reading openoffice.org lists and gnome-office-list less frequently.
 The gnome-office-list is obviously necessary to build consensus about the
final form of an office suite, since such discussion would be naturally
biased if it was held within the frames of one of the contending projects.
 As many of us will be short on time for reading several different
developement lists, it would be a real boon to everyone if some sort of
status report could be built weekly and put on a webpage. Such a report
would let everyone with an interest follow the status of the contending
projects so that I as an openoffice participant could get some easy
knowledge on how the abi team is doing and what the Gnome Office guys
think about both of our (and others') efforts.

>    Going ahead and finishing AbiWord 1.0 before introducing major
>    breakage wouldn't be a bad idea either.  

I can't wait :-)  I think of openoffice as a scary archive of really
powerfull stuff that needs to be digested. Abi is in a golden postion to
provide everyone and their grandmas with a working word processor.
Obviously it would be a good thing :-)

> So, I hope to see posts from hackers at Sun, AbiWord, and any other
> interested groups in the near future, outlining their design goals for
> an office project and how they'd move toward them; maybe distinguish
> your "must have" goals from your "could compromise on this" goals.

My two cents on Abi vs OpenOffice:
 I may be very wrong about this, but as I've come to understand is, Abi is
working specificly with providing the GNOME Office with a portable word
processor component. OpenOffice (or rather Sun, maybe?) is more concerned
with the creation of a full office suite that is much less tied to a
specific platform -- one that could happily replace installed Star Offices
in a few years.
 Thus, it may not be a good idea for the OpenOffice team to scrap their
parts in favour of another team's, since OpenOffice must be able to
present a full product in a non-GNOME environment.
 What OpenOffice could do is (1) to provide well separated components
which could easily (?) be brought into the GNOME Office later. (2) To
build a first class virtual components environment. I.e. to provide a
build environment where components could be built for Bonobo, KDE-parts,
MS COM or whatever.
 That would let us make components that could made GNOME Office native
and *still* be able to place a selfsufficient OpenOffice on the desktop in
a few years.

In my view an office suite should be much like any distribution. Debian
has its distribution of selected Linux stuff, Helix has its distribution
of selected GNOME stuff, and GNOME Office should have its distribution of
selected office components.


harebra / klasa