Re: What is GNOME office?

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik ireland sun com>]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Martin Sevior wrote:

> 
> 
> 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. 
> 

"we" is always ambiguous and misleading. It's a sad fact of life.

> The Open office guys are very happy that we take their code. They won't

Of course. Why shouldn't we?

> take code that does not have the SISSL license. This is a tremendous

We can't. It would compromise the ability of 'people' to take OO code and
use it in a proprietary application - in some ways, SISSL *is* less
restrictive than GPL.

> 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.
> 

>8->

I'd like to see somebody keeping OO (or a significant part thereof) on a
non-vendor branch and doing something about it. 

Keeping it on a vendor branch and making *slight* changes may be doable.

> 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.
> 

All OpenOffice code *is* available as GPL. You have a full GPL licenced
Office suite and you don't even have to maintain it. 8-)

> 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.
> 

Same here. We don't have a killer Office Suite quite yet. SO/OO 6.0 will
be better, but I'd hesitate to say that quite there.

	Sander

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