Re: Mono and GNOME. The long reply.

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

Hi Miguel,
	 Thank you for your interesting perspective on why you've chosen
this long term project. My only concern with your choice of actions is
that it moves very scare resources into a long term project that *might*
pay off in 2 - 3 years.

Ximian has done an outstanding job in Evolution. I can't help but wonder
what could be achieved if the same concentration of talents was placed on
the development of the other killer apps of a modern desktop.

Most notabally:

A word processor and a presentation program. 

Gnumeric is more than enough for my humble needs as a scientist and
academic but AbiWord has a long to go before I can use it as a drop-in
replacement for MS Word. Gnome has no presentation program at all and I
cringe when I go to conferences and see scientists who I know use Linux
all day for their data analysis make their presentations in Power
Point. At my University we're strongly encouraged to use Power Point for
all lectures.

Having been intimately involved in AbiWord for the past two years and
having come to know the developers on the team very well, I can assure you
that 5 full time developers would make a huge difference in development
speed.

So the qustions have to be asked: 

Isn't it better to get these apps written first? 
How can gnome make a case for being a modern desktop without these
fundamental programs? 
Does it make sense to spend two years developing a
framework so that you can spend only 2 years writing a Word Processor
having written the framework?

In any case we at AbiWord will keep on coding in whatever time we can
snatch.

Best wishes

Martin Sevior