Re: What is GNOME office?

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com>]

Hello!

> I think it's a bit more complicated than that; we can't just say "oh,
> they are all good, work on any of them" if people ask us what to work
> on - both companies such as MandrakeSoft and volunteers will be
> unhappy with that answer. And in this case the task is so large the
> duplication of effort seems like a bad thing to me. We don't really
> need a free competitor; we have MS Office to keep us inspired.
> 
> Remember that Microsoft's #1 attack on free software is that we don't
> have central vision and don't have well-integrated software. GNOME has
> in many ways been an answer to that, bringing enough expertise
> together to start to finally create a solid, unified higher-level
> system on top of UNIX. Components, GUI toolkit, etc. are part of that,
> but the office suite is also part of it; especially since the office
> components are frequently used as the core of custom applications and
> are thus part of the development environment.

Seems that many guys have forgotten - OK, after all many of us are already
hired to work on Gnome - that one of the main goals of free software is
joy of programming and good community. And in that respect many otherwise
identical projects certainly are not interchangeable.
So saying to Project A developers, that A will not be 'official gnome'
program will in no ways encourage those people to work on Project B. And if
the opinion of foundation will eventually drive Project A out of business
(due to the decreasing interest of outside developers) they will most
probably leave gnome development completely (landing in the camps of KDE
or whatever.)
And Gnome certainly will not become stronger from that...
Keep (all) developers happy - or Gnome will lose its position as quickly,
as it gained it (remember year 1998?)

Lauris