Subject: Re: GNOME Office and OpenOffice (fwd)
From: Larry Kollar (kollar@alltel.net)
Date: Sat Oct 28 2000 - 04:46:56 CDT
Martin Sevior wrote:
>---------- Forwarded message from: Havoc Pennington
>Computer writer Evan Leibovitch recently contacted the steering
>committee to ask about the relationship of AbiWord to
>OpenOffice. According to him, some members of the AbiWord team are
>worried [...] AbiWord will be entirely dropped, without consulting
>them. Evan is writing [an inaccurate] article about this....
I read that article yesterday. Martin, Even writes that you
asked to join the GNOME committee on behalf of the AbiWord
developers some time ago and (again according to the article)
you were told to pony up some big $$$ first. Can you confirm/
deny this?
Havoc again:
>I'd like to take the opportunity to 1) apologize to the AbiWord team
>for the confusion and 2) ask the AbiWord team to please participate in
>discussions about this, and feel free to initiate such discussions. At
>the same time, Sun should be actively working to meet and work with
>existing GNOME Office hackers. The burden is on _both_ the AbiWord
>and OpenOffice projects to communicate. [....]
>If people don't make a serious and sustained effort to do this, it's
>going to damage the prospects of free software office solutions. ....
Based on GNOME, anyway. KDE 2.0 is out, along with Koffice, and
that groaning sound you've been hearing this week is the strain
on the Net as thousands of people download & compile gigabytes
of code. :-)
Unfortunately, perceptions (vs. reality) mean a lot even in the
hacker world. The perception that *BSD was in major legal hot
water steered people away from trying it just as Linus released
his first kernels. The perception that KDE had *serious* licensing
problems prompted the purists to direct their efforts elsewhere.
The perception that the GNOME leadership is a closed cabal is
getting them bad press at a time when GNOME is most vulnerable.
* * * * * * * * *
However, as others have pointed out, AbiWord's prime goal is
portability -- being GNOME-savvy is only one part of that.
* * * * * * * * *
If I were emperor (which I'm not, obviously), I'd keep things going
the way they are. Being an official part of GNOME Office would be
nice, but it's not a necessity. AbiWord is not a heavyweight word
processor like Word Perfect or StarWriter, and there will always be
a need for both.
Meanwhile, I'd like to see an article focusing on Abi's continued
development & emphasis on portability. I'll write it myself if I
have to. :-)
Larry
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