Re: GNOME Office and OpenOffice

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"Dom Lachowicz" <cinamod hotmail com> writes: 
> Yes, Evan has contacted members of the AbiWord team,
> including(only?) myself, though his questions didn't particularly
> relate to OpenOffice (OO). Mainly he wanted to know more about our
> relationship to the Gnome Foundation, since I had at one point
> naively "requested" membership in it. Michael Meeks clarified to me
> that the big coroporations were paying large sums of $$ to get
> figurehead positions and that we could get the same result by
> joining the gnome-foundation mailing list and voting/running for
> office, which at least I have done. Which reminds me to write/submit
> my candidacy speech...
>

To address this point, we're also letting nonprofit groups and
projects join the advisory board with the corporations, obviously with
no fee. Evan gets this wrong in his article. Debian and the FSF are
joining the advisory board for example. If the AbiWord project wanted
to join I think that would be fine.
 
> Personally (i.e. not speaking for AbiWord as a whole), I never felt
> that AbiWord was being dropped from Gnome Office and replaced by OO
> components. In fact, sadly, I never thought that we were never
> really considered part of Gnome-Office to begin with, other than a
> mention on gnews when new versions come out and a small webpage in
> the "Office" section of the main Gnome website.
>

To explain and not excuse this, originally when AbiWord was run by
AbiSource, we asked them to be in GNOME Office, and Eric Sink told us
that yes we could use it for GNOME Office, but that wouldn't ever be
the primary function or goal of the AbiWord project. So in some sense
the "non-GNOME-integration" was something the AbiWord project wanted
at the time. I've noticed that as far as activity on abiword-dev,
there's much more GNOME focus now.

> Peaceful co-existance is possible.

Indeed, if you guys decide that's what you want, it's not a problem. 
I'd just like to see a good, friendly, thorough discussion about it.

Martin Sevior sent me a nice initial comparison of AbiWord
vs. StarWriter in his view, that I'm hoping he'll post here.

Havoc