Re: OO as GNOME software (topic change)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Sam TH <sam uchicago edu> writes:
> 
> If, tommorow, KWord (or Eterm, or what have you) decided to claim that
> it was GNOME software, and wanted to be in the release, what would
> people say?  People would say that it didn't interoperate with GNOME,
> that it didn't use GTK, that it didn't have anything to do with GNOME
> at all, really.  If they wanted to be part of the release, we would
> want a reason.  
> 
> So, the question seems to be, given that any other application like
> OpenOffice wouldn't be in the release, and that we would be upset
> about it claiming GNOME imprimatur without any real association, why
> is OpenOffice getting both?  

Well, I'm not sure OpenOffice will be in the release - it isn't in
1.4, and presumably would go through the same process as anything else
to be in 2.0.

I don't know what that process says about use or non-use of GTK.

Honestly if any program is really interested in working with GNOME and
is a useful program and does interoperate in a reasonable way, I'm not
sure I have much objection ot it, and I think that was the general
view at the board meeting that talked about this. At the same time
people did see value in using GTK and other aspects of GNOME Office,
and thought a lot of users might like that more than OpenOffice. So
it's kind of a "leave it up to the users" policy. 

> If you want to be specific, what other non-GTK applications are being
> considered for a GNOME release?  

Well, Nautilus uses MOzilla, and we do use a lot of libs that aren't
particularly G-ified such as image libs, libxml, popt, libart, etc.

Some anti-GNOME "advocates" post stuff such as "GNOME can't even write
its own [whatever]" - these people are IMHO morons - NIH syndrome is
bad, not good. ;-) Interoperability is good. Shared code is
good. MOdularity is good. The GNOME project is about usability for
free software operating systems, it's not about putting the GNOME logo
all over everything.

> [And it would be really nice to just be able to post to this list,
> instead of going through a moderator.  How does one accomplish that?]  
> 

Mail gnome-sysadmin and ask to get on it.

Havoc