Re: OO as GNOME software (topic change)

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> 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.

Sticky shift-O ? ;-)

We're not talking about NIH. I have no fundamental problems with OO as
long as it really is interested in integrating and interoperating with
GNOME. Regarding the non-gtk-using libraries...if something doesn't need
a particular GNOME library and it has no discernable effect on the user
it obviously should still be reasonably part of the GNOME platform. It
seems clear that it would be "more GNOME" to use GTK+, and that OO's own
widget system is a clear overlap with GNOME.

I'd be interested in hearing Sun's stance on this. Talking with various
engineers involved with OO, I have the distinct impression that they
wouldn't be interested in integrating GTK+ patches at all, that they
want to be "100% platform independent" ala Mozilla rather than having
some sort of internal compatibility layer with platform specific
frontends (ala AbiWord). This to me seems like a non-GNOME-compatible
stance (though I have yet to hear it as the official word), esp. as Sun
still seems to prioritize their Windows OO version in terms of look,
feel, and smooth platform integration.

-Seth