Re: What is GNOME office?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com> writes: 
> I suggest everyoune to try to distinguish between 2 goals:
> 1) We want 'politically' conquer world desktops
> 2) We want to produce techincally best desktop in world
> Current state of things seems to suggest, that they do not fit well
> together. Techincal excellence just involves too much code rewrite and too
> slow progress to compete with inferior products. And becoming the dominant
> desktop creates huge backward-compatibility intertia.
> 

I don't agree - I think Microsoft and Apple technologies are extremely
high quality in general, in many, many ways ahead of us. Beating them
will involve making our technology at least as good as theirs, if not
compellingly better. So I think 2) is an essential step in 1). You
can't win on marketing alone. People are using free software because
it meets their needs.

For me in the technical evaluation we need to be thinking of how we'll
have a competitive office suite 2, 3 years down the road; that's the
kind of timeframe that I'd see as realistic. Remember that Netscape
ended up wasting a year trying to develop a bad codebase, then dumped
it and ended up taking 2 more years to write Mozilla, for a total of 3
years on a web browser. I see no reason to expect the office suite
process to be shorter.

I would like to see an OpenOffice 6.0 much sooner than that, just as a
stopgap measure so there's some usable, complete free office suite
available while we work on a really competitive free office suite, but
that's an orthogonal issue. From the GNOME standpoint what we have to
decide is our strategy over several years, not next year.

Havoc