Subject: Re: GNOME Office and OpenOffice (fwd)
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Oct 28 2000 - 07:20:17 CDT
On Sat, 28 Oct 2000, Larry Kollar wrote:
> 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?
This is certainly not true. Dom asked if Abi should join. I can send you
his email to openoffce. We misunderstood how things operated. By joining
as a company Sun or anyone else pays 10K per year and gets 1 vote. The
Foundation people thought Dom was applying on behalf of SourceGear. Which
by their rules would have to pay 10K. By joining as individuals we each
get one vote. So Dom, me, Sam, Joaquin and John Tunison all joined and I
am now happy that the Foundation is in place.
>
> 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. :-)
>
Yeah. I'm anxious to try it out too. However they don't yet have rpms for
RedHat 7.0 and until we sorted out Abi's problems on RedHat 7.0 I don't
want to upgrade.
Frankly I think Koffice is better place to steal code for Abi than
StarOffice. At least I know which part if the Word Processor. Of course
Kword is only useful to people with KDE 2.0 installed. Our potential
market is 100 times bigger :-)
> Unfortunately, perceptions (vs. reality) mean a loteven
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.
>
I hope that we can have all the features and none of the weight. I think
we can do it :-)
> 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. :-)
Go ahead :-)
Cheers
Martin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat Oct 28 2000 - 07:20:29 CDT