Re: [Inkscape-devel] Joining GNOME Office

[Bryce Harrington <bryce osdl org>]

On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Charles Goodwin wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 13:03, msevior physics unimelb edu au wrote:
> > What does this mean? If it means what I think it means I can't see how
> > more pressure could be applied than I already feel to "join the winning
> > team".
> >
> > Frankly the pressure just motivates me to work harder om AbiWord and Gnome
> > Office.
> >
> > OO.o falls way short of my vision of a Productivity Suite could be.
>
> I think Bryce was referring more to fd.o than OOo.

Right.  I think to be able to compete effectively against OOo, strong
allies are needed.

Obviously if I thought time would be better spent working on OOo, well
I'd probably be working on OO Draw.  ;-)  I did look into working on OO
Draw a while back but it just didn't "click" for me.  I don't know if
the other OOo app codebases are the same way, but if so, they could run
into long term problems if they lack enough developers to keep up.

But more importantly I wanted to emphasize that a _strategy_ is needed.
For example, with Inkscape our strategy for competing effectively with
OO Draw is pretty straightforward.  First, we shoot for gaining really
good SVG compatibility (OO Draw is weak here, and it seems like SVG is
growing to become an extremely important file format in the open source
community).  Second, we try to make the project very enjoyable to work
in; happy developers are productive developers.  Third, we try to
encourage experimentation and don't dismiss new ideas just because
they're oddball ("patch first, discuss later"); if Inkscape can gain
some strange but really handy new feature that no other application has,
it could be that killer advantage that opens up huge new possibilities.
And finally, we focus more on trying to put out a great product for
certain users, than trying to gain a huge userbase; this way we enjoy
having a small and fun user community that team with us in finding how
to make the app better, rather than just an endless stream of anonymous
bug reports.  ;-)

> Also, GO and OOo are two very different beasts with different
> architectures and different goals.  The GO approach is to aim to be the
> best and collaborate to help that happen.  The OOo approach, from my
> perspective, is a fully integrated office suite that is a drop-in
> replacement for MSO.

Very true.  File format compatibility appears to be a large part of
this.  It has made me wonder if one could extract the document format
parsing bits from OOo and turn them into reusable libraries.

> By whatever means a formal plan needs to evolve.  I think the informal
> collaboration between AbiWord, Gnumeric, and Gnome-DB was ideal for that
> phase of GO development.  But if more projects are going to come into
> the fold then surely it needs to be formalised on how they can align
> themselves with and contribute to GO.

Agreed.  Having a specific mission, with exciting goals, and a clear
strategy for achieving them could help a great deal.

Bryce