On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 01:34:20PM -0700, Miles Lane wrote:
> Hmm. That really depends on how you look at it. I think saying
> this development is bad news for gnome-office is short sighted.
That's why I said not so good instead of bad :)
In the extremely short timeframe we are living in, (Sta^H^H^HOpen
Office provides an excellentshort term solution for 'office' apps.
We hope to provide the longer term tools.
> Consider, Ximian is one of the largest contributors to Gnome
> development and is also one of the most effective groups
> at promoting the Linux desktop. This StarOffice deal will bring
> more money to Ximian and help increase the adoption for the
> Gnome desktop. Both of these things will be good for gnome-office
> in the long term.
Why wouldn't OpenOffice be used? At least it would be Free Software.
That's the worse part of the news. Right now Ximian is saying:
<<Free Software is good. But if you really want to do serious work, you
have to use proprietary software.>>
Disclaimer: The text above is 100% ficticious.
This StarOffice 'offering' is bad promotion for Free Software.
> We know that Gnome-office doesn't have a lot of the functionality
> that MS Office users want. StarOffice is a lot closer. We just
If you mean OpenOffice, please use OpenOffice and not StarOffice as the
words to say. One gives users Freedoms, the other does not, and that is
a Bad Thing (tm).
> need to stay focused and make Gnome Office a good competitor to
> MS Office. I'm sure that if we develop a thoroughly compatible
> and feature comparable office suite, we'll have no trouble
> getting it adopted by distributions and users.
It will never be fully compatible unless Microsoft Free's enough code.
As long as we keep that in mind, we have to fight for the best possible
compatibility, but worry more about providing a techincally better Free
product.
Any other strain of thought (like be 100% compatible) is a waste of
everyone's time in the current state of affairs.
As far as I see, we are already better, we grant our users freedoms MS
Office does not. In fact, we grant them Freedom of Speech, which is more
than we can say about a certain tool that ''''can be considered a part of
MS Office'''' which is Frontpage (the web page creation tool), that
actively restraains Freedom of Speech by forbiding its users to make web
pages against Microsoft, or subsidiaries or its products, IIRC.
If you're talking about OO.o, please do so with the terms OpenOffice and
not StarOffice.
Cheers, rui
Attachment:
pgpAbxoZ1f4m2.pgp
Description: PGP signature