Subject: Re: ASSERT(AbiWord 1.0 != Word 2002)
rms@greymalkin.yi.org
Date: Tue May 01 2001 - 17:05:51 CDT
On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 01:46:46PM -0700, Paul Rohr wrote:
> I assume that you're very frustrated, but please apologize for this.
There's nothing to apologise.
> I am neither stupid or irresponsible. To my knowledge, neither is anyone
> else who's been advocating that we ship a 1.0 release like many of us have
> always intended to do.
No one said that. I said it was a stupid thing (Einstein also did stupid things) to do things this way.
> Software teams that don't draw a feature line never ship.
^Software^Commercial Software^
> Software products that never ship are, in the long run, doomed to fail.
AbiWord has had more releases than I can count on my fingers, and I see it as a huge success growing almost exponentialy with each release. You're entitled to your judgement on the success of AbiWord, of course.
> You have every right to diagree as passionately as you'd like, but you have
> no right to be rude about it.
Funny, I don't remember being rude, but then, I can't give a penny less for politically correctness.
On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 01:46:46PM -0700, Paul Rohr wrote:
> I'd like to suggest that if you asked anyone on this list whether we should
> wait to release AbiWord 1.0 until it had each and every feature of Word
> 2002, they'd say:
> "No."
You're abusing of something an ancient greek school of polititian used.
Actually, now that I think of it, many still do it today, which is probably why a lot of people are so suspicious of democracy.
> approximately, what, 20 years now? Why would we want to wait to ship our
> first release until it reaches that bloaty stage?
No. But the 100% of the dozens of people I introduced abiword to would rather it had the features (which are not unreasonable claims) they asked for will be EVEN more disappointed.
I told them. This is a stable release, so that people can try and report bugs, and help it reach a better stage of usability when the final 1.0 version comes.
They shrugged and said "well, maybe then I'll check it out".
This has been standard behaviour. Period. Launching a 1.0 with the currently planned feature set is an image killer, not an image booster.
If no one can pin point the finger at you for the product not being finished and thus not having a particular feature, there's the hope that it may be included.
If they can ("hey, it's a 1.0 release, it should have tables, that's just basic") think of a motive to downplay AbiWord, they will. After all, why change to a perfect round number as 1.0 that can't properly handle their word processing needs, which are so common?
> Instead, it makes sense to release a "reasonable" subset of those features
> that most people use. The problem we seem to be tripping over here is how
> to define what that first stab at "reasonable" will be.
What *NOBODY* has ever presented here is a motive to release a 1.0 (except for that sad "Software products that never ship" or that thing with the gtk+ 2) that can really give us a better image.
What are you expecting by getting a 1.0? All I see is:
Important features that *will not be* there.
Time lost implementing them because it had to be 1.0, and all the time from 0.9 to 1.0 has to be featureless in order to make it absolutely unbuggy. Erms, We're open source, we launch it when it's ready, not on the dead line.
People complaining for the lack of that xpto reasonable feature they expected to find on a final version of a word processor, thus lowering our karma score.
> 1. We all use different features. Sure, there are power-users who really
> need every single one of the following "advanced" features:
> - footnotes,
> - equations,
> - legal citations,
> - complex tables,
> - etc.
Of these features, only equations and complex tables (maybe etc too) are "advanced". All other are extremely reasonable to demand (I am looking from the end user point of view here) on a Word Processor that is out with a huge "feature complete" version.
> I've gotta admit that I'm not sure I'd want to meet such a person in a dark
> alley -- and not just because AbiWord can't meet all her needs yet. ;-)
> However, most people only use a subset of those, and not even on a regular
> basis. Thus, how do you pick and choose which subset is "reasonable"?
Things you can find in 90% of the non technical books are a good example.
Footnotes, simple tables, an image well positioned, etc.
Technical books are more or less of an example of the usage of advanced features.
> 2. More importantly, we don't currently have developers ready to fully
> implement all of those features. While we can come up with clever partial
> solutions to corner cases of some of those features, getting them fully
> implemented so they Just Work can be a significant effort.
On more reason to not worry about a 1.0, as it will only comeout *when*it's*ready*.
If we don't have developers for all that, then do it one step at a time.
Let's do this, then head on to that. With each release new contributors show up. Specially with releases that *add*features*that*people*expect*to*find*!
> a pragmatic solution
> --------------------
> Fans of AbiWord who've been watching for a while will notice that the
> definition of what goes in 1.0 hasn't changed much in a long long time.
(...)
> So what's the net effect of that relentless focus? We now have a product
> that is tantalizingly close to reaching that original goal. It also has a
> number of additional features that we never counted on.
> bottom line
> -----------
> I claim that for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who currently
> use AbiWord, the best thing we could do is release a polished, bomb-proof,
> speedy implementation of the many, many useful features we already have.
> I'll be proud to call that product AbiWord 1.0, and brag to anyone who'll
> listen about what a tremendous accomplishment this has been. We started
> from nothing, built a talented community of developers, translators,
> writers, evangelists, and users. We built a product that runs natively on
> almost every important desktop platform, and can be ported to anything we
> missed.
> Most importantly, every feature that we've implemented *so far* Just Works,
> because we've taken the time and pain and sweat and effort to make sure that
> it does. [ Insofar as this isn't true today, any known exceptions should be
> logged in Bugzilla so we have a chance to fix them before 1.0 ships. ]
> Sure, AbiWord 1.0 doesn't have every feature that Word 2002 has. They had a
> 20-year head start, after all. If that means that users still want to spend
> billions every year paying for some other product, they have the right to
> make that choice.
You are missing the point with a distance that would make Pluto infinitely closer to the Sun.
Abiword 1.0, by your plans won't have half of the features a word processor of more than Five years ago had. And I don't mean just MS Word. It's not a problem of the features of Word 2002, but more like, for instance, Word 5.0 for the Mac.
We're in a completely different ballpark than eons ago. Nowadays, the current featureset of abiword won't impress more than a couple of geeks and some few others, because it *JUST*CAN'T*COMPETE*.
> However, we'll also be happy to point out that if they really want software
> that they'll:
> - love to use and
> - like paying for ...
> ... well, we can think of better places for them to send that money. :-)
And play the arrogant part, instead of the humble part.
Which will, of course, be much better, to just incite contempt for us.
Instead, I say we play the humble part, in which we present an each time better stable beta, untill we have a real reason to be proud of, as, for instance, a really competing product.
I don't see Evolution launching a 1.0 without good support for encription. Why? Because while that was tolerable years ago, today, that is a fatal flaw for an email program. Duh! Evolution will also not release a 1.0 version that can't connect to a secure pop server or even secure imap. Why? Same reason. Evolution will not release a 1.0 version that can't sync with pdas. Why? You guessed. Same reason: All other good competitors have those features, somehow. Now, having a text gui? While I'd love that, its target is more desktop users, desktop-gui would be welcome, but not a priority for 1.0.
As much as I'd like to have AbiWord 1.0 out tomorrow, we can't do that for the same reason. Even other opensource competitors have some of our much needed simple and reasonable features. Not all, but some. End users don't care whether we have a good or bad implementation of tables. Only that we haven't any, under current plans even though Martin has been doing an excelent job of an intermediary step.
That way, 1.0 will make Paul, Sam, some others too happy, but will cause contempt in most end users.
<ironic>I'm sure that that's all you want</ironic>, right?
Hugs, rms
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