Re: OO as GNOME software (topic change)

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

I don't want to sound cruel and anti-OO! The reason I am interested in
this is because OO is already such a good product, and I would like to
see everyone working on the same page for the greater benefit of GNOME.
It doesn't seem that now would be the appropriate time in the OO product
cycle to throw GTK+ in, beacuse it does seem important for OpenOffice to
produce a release that "regains" the ground lost with the removal of
closed elements from the codebase. I'm not asking for this.

What I desire is for us to form some conception today of what we will
possibly mandate tomorrow. It seems wrong for there to be even the
possibility that we will not include OO as part of the GNOME office in a
release, and not inform them of that possibility today so decisions and
changes can be considered. I think as Maciej pointed out, Mozilla's
non-inclusion in GNOME 1.4 demonstrates at least some precedent for
useful and potentially necessary applications not being included because
they do not use GTK+ for their interface. If there is a chance we will
do this, I think it is helpful to all parties involved that this be
disclosed openly to the parties making decisions concerning OO's
direction, so nobody feels betrayed or lead. Havoc, I know you don't
like the somewhat metaphysical tone this conversation is assuming, and I
know consensus has been we should let the decision slide, but I think
providing possible contigencies to Sun is healthy rather than harmful.
It would only be more painful if the OO team feels like they are
informed at the last minute that they will not be a part of a GNOME
release owing to a "problem" they weren't made aware of.

More important to me than making a decision either way at this point is
to inform all parties of the various possibilities so they are aware of
the community feeling, and possible risks etc from the get go. I hope
that in making OO aware we will find out that their long-range plans
include a port to GTK+, or that the desiribility of GTK+ use is new
information and influences their technical decisions.

I probably used too many emotionally charged words, and I recant those
:-) I care a lot about this because I think OO is an important piece in
GNOME's success and I want to see things work out, not because I want to
stab them in the back. This is not a lynch mob, its a suggestion of
tough love ;-) 

-Seth

> I cannot speak for the OO guys though I know a lot of them.
> SO was cross-platform (using its own toolkit) well before there
> was GTK on Win32...Remember also that there was a fair bit of
> non-open stuff in SO that had to come out in the process of
> morphing it into OO. I think priorities, for awhile yet, are
> likely to be on improving things that are obviously deficient
> rather than things that are arguably just "unsociable."