Subject: Re: GNOME Foundation and AbiWord
From: Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@vitelus.com)
Date: Mon Aug 21 2000 - 11:24:01 CDT
On a kind of related note, I would appreciate being unbanned from
#gnome.
Thanks.
On Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 05:39:40PM +1000, Martin Sevior wrote:
>
>
> 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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