Re: What is GNOME office?

[Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>]

On 15 Nov 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 
> 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.
> 

The use of "we" in this discussion is rather misleading. Right now there
are hackers working on GUPPI, gnumeric, Abiword, Actung,... and hackers
working on Open Office. 

The Open office guys are very happy that we take their code. They won't
take code that does not have the SISSL license. This is a tremendous
restriction and will not allow them to fully utilize all the great work
that has been done building up the Gnome infrastructure. On the other
hand the Gnome hackers can freely cut and paste to their hearts content
and fully utilize the great infrastructure that been established and will
continue to evolve.

Is Gnome Office going to be a product seperate from Open Office? It seems
to me it has to be if we are to maintain a GPL'd Office Suite.

Martin Sevior

PS. I'd be very happy to explain why Abiword is a great foundation for a
killer WP but I don't think we've reached that point yet.