Re: Mono and GNOME. The long reply.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello Martin,


> 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.

I have been suggesting people to work with OpenOffice, and to work with
the OpenOffice hackers to improve that code base.  Although I love
Gnumeric (I wrote a large chunk of it), right now if you want to have
good interoperability with Windows applications, OpenOffice is your best
bet.  They are on the high-end side of the scale.

Evolution took us a couple of years to develop, with a well funded
staff.  Writing large applications like the ones you mention that
duplicate the functionality of OpenOffice is definitely possible, but I
am not sure that there is a strong case to pour a lot of resources into
it.

> 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?

I know that once I have .NET, I will be a happier coder, and would enjoy
more writing code.  Will I write a presentations program?  I do not
know.

But given that OpenOffice exists now, I think that we are given a chance
for the first time look at *other* applications, or looking at new ways
of implementing those applications, or bring new ideas into the table.

Do not look at me for a guide to innovate.  Everyone makes fun of my
desire of cloning existing products, but I encourage you to look at new
and innovative software development for *new needs*.  For the Office
application kind of thing, I am going to stick with `Use OpenOffice'.

Miguel