OpenDocument Spreadsheet support on Gnumeric && INdT collaboration

[Rodrigo Parra Novo <rodrigo novo indt org br>]

   Hi there,

   (I've sent an email much like this to the AbiWord development 
mailing list, Monday, in case anyone wonders ;) )

   first of all, I'd like to introduce myself, and tell you guys about
what we've been up to.

   I'm the team leader of the Office team on OSMTC (Open Source 
Technology Center) at INdT (Nokia Technology Institute - a brazilian 
non-profit R&D institute).

   The main goal of our team is to provide a complete Office Suite
(Gnome Office) for the Maemo Development Platform (and thus, for
any devices which use this platform), supporting fully the OASIS
OpenDocument standard, and using as little resources as possible.

   Right now, our team has five developers, working on:

   - porting AbiWord to Maemo (CVS HEAD already has a large part of it)
   - porting Gnumeric to Maemo (Eduardo sent a patch to this mailing
     list a few weeks ago. a more complete patch, to CVS HEAD should be
     ready in a few days)
   - OpenDocument Text plugin for AbiWord (collaboration has started a
     few days ago)

   and :)

   - OpenDocument Spreadsheet plugin for Gnumeric

   I've read Morten's blog entry on which he comments about the OASIS 
OpenDocument standard, and appreciated it very much from start to end.

   Our objective, WRT OpenDocument Text support, is to (in order)

   - implement a basic import filter for the OpenDocument Spreadsheet
     file format
   - implement a basic export filter for the OpenDocument Spreadsheet
     file format
   - help the implementation of missing features on the standard, if at
     all possible

   Unfortunately, as it happens with the AbiWord filter, we do not have 
the necessary resources to work on both OpenDocument Spreadsheet *and* 
OpenOffice.org 1.0 Spreadsheet support on Gnumeric.

   I would like to hear your opinions on whether this is feasible at 
all and, if so, what would be the better approach: either keep working 
on the "openoffice" plugin, or to completely fork this plugin into a new 
"OpenDocument" plugin.

   Both alternatives seem to have their pros and cons: forking would 
allow for a better/clean job of implementing the new plugin, while work 
on the existing plugin would (probably) let OpenOffice.org 1.0 
Spreadsheet be supported in a better manner than today. On the other 
hand, working on the existing plugin might prove to be too 
clumsy/complex for us.

   What do you guys think?

   Last, but not least, I would like to know if there is someone 
actively working on such plugin, so we can avoid duplicate work. Our 
time frame to start is "immediately", meaning that we are already 
working on this plugin, as I write this email.

   I'd like to thank you in advance for you thoughts and feedback.

   Best regards,

   Rodrigo