Re: What is GNOME office?

[Daniel Veillard <Daniel Veillard w3 org>]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2000 at 09:52:15PM -0500, 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.

  I agree,

> 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 agree. Maybe one of the differences is the componentization, using
bonobo it will be easier to swap modules. This means that the Gnome 
office development as a whole is less linear. I don't think that parallel
developments are a bad think (It's actually (used to be?) a rule in some
large organization software development team). First different people have
different ideas, and it's better to keep the pool large to get the 
larger "brain pool", hoping that good ideas will cross teams. Second
I think it's better to have 2-3 very dedicated hackers working on a
project than a larger pool of 10 persons feeling less concerned. Again
the componentization make a very serious difference, because extracting
subproject becomes possibles so "human sized" projects can be defined.

> 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.

  Okay, I don't know if my personal case is a good example but:
    - I'm following the OO project in the areas where I have some
      expertize (XML and packages)
    - I provide feedback and ideas
    - But the whole framework is so advanced that I don't see any
      particular area where I could go and feel comfortable to hack.
      Especially since I already have a lot of stuff ongoing.

 I wonder if there is any analysis rule of the effect of bringing
a large codebase opensource, do a lot of existing coders 
switch to teh new project or is the new project sufficient to create
its new community.
 I have the feeling (Amaya/Netscape) that getting momentum is quite
harder when a lot of the decision about the code base have already been
made when it get open.
 I sincerely hope that the componentization of OO will avoid this effect
and that using bonobo will allow to define subproject where people feel
comfortable to hack within.

> From the GNOME standpoint what we have to
> decide is our strategy over several years, not next year.

 Isn't the first step to define the precise list of bonobo components we
want, and the specifications of the formats/actions they have to handle.
Then it will be easier to refocuse the people efforts.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard w3 org | W3C, INRIA Rhone-Alpes  | libxml Gnome XML toolkit
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