Re: Gobe Productive goes GPL and GNOME!

["Stuart D. Gathman" <stuart bmsi com>]

On 12 Aug 2002, Daniel Borgmann wrote:

> This basically means that we will get another popular Office suite
> opensourced, but this time the Linuxversion actually builds on GNOME
> libs! Also GP is not huge and slow like StarOffice, it actually fits
> into a 12 MB tarball. An early alphabuild of the GNOME version is also
> available (I didn't tried it yet though as I'm no office user). 
> 
> It will be interesting to see if this will make parts of GNOME Office
> obsolete (or the other way around). At the very least, compatibility
> should be ensured of course. This could be a _huge_ kickstart for GNOME
> Office, maybe even more. What do you think? 

With the size you mention, it sounds like Gobe is comparable to Microsoft
Works.  I welcome the addition of a 'lite' office.  My colleagues that
use Windows use Works rather than Office because it performs decently
on their desktops.

The various "Offices" have become their own operating systems, 
slower than the host operating system because of the extra layer, and
with a large learning curve required to extend because they have their
own API.

I think that the "Offices" embody the level of integration that the GUI
layer of a general purpose operation system (e.g. Gnome or KDE) ought to 
have.  Ultimately, component software will make Office suites obsolete.

I recently bought a new computer that is able to run OpenOffice at 
a reasonable speed.  I was struck by the correspondence of various 
features of Open Office to packages I already had installed.  For instance,
selecting and using the 'Labels' feature was very similar to selecting
and using 'glabels'.  

The main difference was the full editing features available for the Office
labels, compared to the minimalist features in glabels.  When a user can
trivially use AbiWord to edit the content of a glabel, then Gnome will have
truly obsoleted the Office suite.

-- 
			Stuart D. Gathman <stuart bmsi com>
      Business Management Systems Inc.  Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
	"[Microsoft] products are even less buggy than others, in terms of
	    per capita usage." - Steve Balmer, Microsoft Corporation