Re: [dev] GNOME Office and OpenOffice

[sam th <sam uchicago edu>]

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On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, Klas Lindberg wrote:

> 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.

I hope it works that smoothly.  

> 
> >  - 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.
> 

Well, I write the AbiWord weekly news, a job at which I have been recently
derelict, but there will be a new issue up today.   

As for communication, the post you replied to generated a number of
enlightening posts on the gnome-office-list from AbiWord and GNOME people,
but nothing at all (till now) from OpenOffice people.  I hope that some
OpenOffice folks can look at those archives and think about and maybe even
address some of the issues we raised.  

> > 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.

This, as has been pointed out, is a gross mischaracterization of
AbiWord.  Our goal is to be the "World's Word Processor," meaning that we
are available on every significant platform in the computer world.  

>  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.

AbiWord will always be available in non-gnome enviroments.  
           
	sam th		     
	sam uchicago edu
	http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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