Re: More Political Stuff.

[Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>]

On 25 Aug 2000, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> 
> Also the issue with StarOffice.  I've used StarOffice a couple times,
> along with ApplixWare, and my God did they ever suck horribly.  Is
> StarOffice REALLY going to be the official GNOME desktop?  Why can't we
> develop our own software?  We have Gnumeric, and AbiWord could be great
> too if it got worked on more (its development seems Gods-awful slow to
> me).  We have Dia, and GIMP, etc.  What true point is there to using
> StarOffice?  I mean, options are nice, but there needs to be one
> official office suite, and I honestly think GNOME needs its own, not a
> borrowed office suite that isn't that good to begin with.  Porting the
> code to GNOME-libs and bonobo would probably take more time than just
> writing our own: I know I find development a hell of a lot easier than
> porting code to new API's.

The abiword hackers haven't been in touch with SUN at all about Star
Office. We should do this but we've been too busy doing stuff we need
for 1.0. Expect lots of Gnome (and other) goodies after the 0.7.11 release
(due Real Soon Now). However 0.7.11 is mainly step along the way. Although
we've made about 700 commits over the last 2 months a lot of it is behind
the scenes stuff that isn't immediately obvious. Building a word processor
is hard work. We will keep hacking though. Hopefully Sun will help us.
We've already got the foundation they need. Fully GUI independence, an
active and lively development community and other stuff they'll want too.  

Cheers

Martin Sevior