Subject: Re: GNOME Foundation and AbiWord
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Aug 21 2000 - 02:39:40 CDT
On 20 Aug 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:
Thanks for your email Havoc. I find your book very useful too :-)
<snip>
>
> Incidentally, one of the best ways to participate would be for
> AbiWord contributors to become members and vote; to do so, add
> yourself to gnome-foundation/membership.txt in GNOME CVS if you can,
> and otherwise mail membership@gnome.org with your full real name, your
> email address, and a sentence or so describing your contribution to
> the GNOME project (for example, "I work on AbiWord"). Then the
> membership coordinators (Maciej Stachowiak and Dan Mueth at the
> moment) will add you to membership.txt.
I've just done this.
>
> Also of course, you guys should all get on the GNOME mailing lists if
> you aren't, and just keep up with GNOME in general! We'll definitely
> welcome you if you want to participate in lists or on #gnome or
> whatever. I try to lurk here and catch crucial communication gaps like
> this, but I don't read every message.
I've done this too.
<snip>
>
> Most likely though, we are not going to want two word processor
> projects in GNOME Office, though of course anyone (Sun or AbiWord or
> whoever) can work independently using any of the code, it's all GPL.
> It's a lot better to focus efforts on one project.
This makes sense, however Abiword developers are mostly interested in
building a genuinely cross platform Word Processor. I really LIKE the idea
of Abi being the GNOME Word Processor (which is in fact why I started to
code for it). However I personally think that Abi has the potential to go
very soon where Gnome may get in 3 years, onto the desktops (and internet
access appliances) of 100 million people.
>
> So the ideal situation, from my perspective, would be that the Sun
> community (the Sun engineers are supposed to be able to talk to us and
> start hacking publically Monday) and the GNOME community, including
> AbiWord, talk together and work out the best plan of action to get
> this single office suite. That's what will go on with Gnumeric, and
> you guys should actively pursue the Sun people and work things out.
> Remember that some of the Sun engineers aren't used to how open source
> works, so give them the benefit of the doubt and explain slowly. ;-)
>
> I think Sun also wants a cross-platform suite, but I think they intend
> to do that by using GTK+ on win32, and enhancing it if necessary.
> I could be wrong.
Well if they want genuine cross platform, they might as well just adopt
Abiword. We've already got GUI independence in place, which is something
a number of other projects are working towards. (GIMP, gphoto, Lyx spring
to mind). On the other hand StarWriter has features we lack like
Equations, Frames and Tables.
> Whatever the technical details, Sun has promised to run things in an
> open manner and leave those details open to discussion.
>
> I can't overstate how valuable it would be to have a word processor
> actively developed by _both_ the vibrant free software community at
> AbiWord and the many engineers Sun is donating; either group alone
> would be unable to achieve as much as the combination.
>
I fully agree and even if SUN doesn't see the inherent beauty of abiword
and adopts us, there are a number of obvious places for code sharing.
<snip>
>
> So I hope things work out well and we can get everyone behind an
> excellent combined word processor effort. If there's anything I can do
> to help, or any questions people have, please feel free to send me
> mail.
>
> I fully expect to see a healthy flamewar^H^H^H^H^H discussion before
> this gets sorted out, but if all the relevant people from Sun and the
> community participate, I bet it can be worked out.
I hope so and I hope that we aren't distracted from our main aim which is
to get Abiword up to 1.0. One thing that we won't give up are our Windows,
BeOS and QNX ports. We still hope to have a Mac port eventually. We have a
lot of talented developers on those platforms who make Abi a much stronger
and more interesting project. People should be able to easily exchange
documents no matter what their computer is.
Thanks once again for your views.
Martin Sevior
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