Re: [Inkscape-devel] Joining GNOME Office

[Martin Sevior <msevior seviorpc ph unimelb edu au>]

On Fri, 2004-02-20 at 04:59, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> 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.
> 

< /me removes 500 kg chip from shoulder>

Thanks very much for the clarification Bryce.

> 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.  ;-)
> 

Well from an AbiWord perspective we're doing pretty much these things
too. We're certainly exploring new ways of improving the UI and adding
features and functionality not found in OOo or MS Word.

> > 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.
> 

They're far from that but they do have good MS Word filters. I pity the
poor secretary forced to use OOo after years of MS Office. To me the
point is that with OOo it is possible to exist without MS Office.
 
> 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.
> 

So far the strategy has been "make the best applications possible in the
time available". "Be a fun environment to develop in." We're now moving
to the "you got this nice piece of code how about putting it somewhere
we can all use it" stage.

Charles would like us to produce a roadmap. From my perspective such
things are really hard. I find it hard enough to know when I personally
will complete things in my goals. Predicting what other people will do
is even harder.

Case in point. I thought getting good Indic and Arabic language support
would be a really hard problem to solve in AbiWord. Yesterday however,
Tomas Frydrych committed a patch to refactor our codebase that will
eventually allow us to re-use complex language libraries like pango,
uniscribe or SILGraphite to do these. Will it work? Probabally knowing
Tomas. How long will it take? It depends on how much time Tomas has and
how hard the problem is to solve.

In any case I guess we can make an attempt by rounding up our developers
and seeing if we can work out at least what they *think* they will get
done soon.

Cheers

Martin

> Bryce
> 
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