Re: Gnome Office updates

["Dom Lachowicz" <cinamod hotmail com>]

> There's a difference between being all-inclusive and 
> referencing/supporting.
>
> The 'Gnome Office' default apps should all be best of breed, but we should 
> encourage futher development of other office applications for Gnome.

In my opinion, if they're not "included" and instead only "referenced", then 
they're not part of Gnome Office and thus don't belong on our "Software that 
makes up Gnome Office" webpage. Maybe they could be included in a "related 
projects" page, but then I think that we'd be jerks if we also didn't 
include links to OpenOffice, KOffice, etc... there as well.

> So we should encourage better collaboration of the small set of apps, but 
> also encourage others with an approach of "we'll help and advocate you as 
> an office application for Gnome, but not part of the Gnome Office suite of 
> applications."

Right. So again, these sorts of projects don't belong in our software list.

> One of the big things about Free Software is motivation.  It's very easy to 
> get started, but much hard to progress and complete software.  We should 
> take a proactive approach to keeping the development of other applications 
> active/

I've started and maintained more projects than I care to mention. We all 
know all of this. There is a distinct difference between proactively 
motivating other applications and presenting a unified front to our users. I 
don't want to slight, ignore, or cause to stagnate any software project 
here. But I also don't want to confuse our users, deliver an inferior 
product to them, or weaken my brands' names.

Gnome Office first and foremost must be about making decisions that are best 
for our users. While I want to motivate and help as many other software 
projects out there, that is a secondary goal here, and one probably not best 
done via this forum. I want what's best for our users, and I see that as 
being (at least partially) incompatible with promoting every piece of 
software that comes across freshmeat.

Dom

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