Re: Another try to get a response

[Jean Bréfort <jean brefort normalesup org>]

There are a few essential points that were not addressed in this thread.
The fact that we do not ship any 1.8.x version compiled for MS-Windows
is because we are still facing major issues. At least, print preview and
contextual help don't work.
When we have a decent windows version, then we can think how to make
things easy for windows users. As long as it is experimental software,
it might give a bad image of what free softawre is to MS-Windows users.
The current development release (1.9.3) is the best we ever had for
MS-Windows, but it is not a stable release, at least officially (it is
not really unstable, I'm using it everyday).

Just my $.02

Best regards,
Jean

Le mardi 18 novembre 2008 à 20:32 -0500, Allin Cottrell a écrit :
> On Wed, 19 Nov 2008, John Machin wrote:
>
> > On 19/11/2008 04:42, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 09:34 -0800, George Dell wrote:
> > > > Thank you for engaging me on this issue.  While I am a deep
> > > > believer in freedom as you mention it I also need to be able
> > > > to have people (who understand none of the technospeak and
> > > > specialized words), able to get to an installed usable
> > > > version.  Even your answer leaves my head swimming...
>
> > > Installing gnumeric is usually trivial and you don't even need
> > > to go to the gnumeric web site.
> > >
> > > If you are using Debian...
> >
> > I'm not aware of any difficulty experienced by Windows users
> > installing free and open software like Firefox (competes with MS
> > Internet Explorer)  or Openoffice.org (competes with Microsoft
> > Office). Their web pages seem to be lucid enough:
>
> The story so far:
>
> * George Dell -- who is obviously (to anyone who read his original
> posting) running MS Windows -- remarks on the difficulty of
> installing current gnumeric (or rather, finding an installer for
> current gnumeric).
>
> * Andreas G offers a basically irrelevant response that assumes a
> Linux user.
>
> * John Machin points out that some other free software projects,
> in contrast to gnumeric, offer a relatively easy installation path
> for users of MS Windows.
>
> My 2 cents: It's a "philosophical" issue and there's no single
> right answer.  Many if not most developers of free software abhor
> MS Windows (yes, I'm speaking for myself here!), yet we have to
> recognize that most computer users still run Windows.  Perhaps we
> think they ought to get a clue and use something better than
> Windows (as I do).  At the same time, if we think our program is
> really good, we probably want to make it available to people who
> persist in running Windows.
>
> This is clear: No free software project "owes the world" an MS
> Windows version.  But if a project such as gnumeric _does_ decide
> to make an such a version available, then IMO it should do so with
> good grace.  By this I mean, the MS Windows version should be
> easily identifiable by Windows-users who visit the project's
> website looking for a download: "Installer for MS Windows HERE..."
>
> Allin Cottrell
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