Just a couple of comments, see below. On Nov 28, 2007 8:06 PM, Jeff Waugh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Around the time of the establishment of the GNOME Foundation, the GNOME > community (under much clearer leadership at the time than we have now) > basically ceded all office/productivity development to OpenOffice.org, > with the idea at the time being that OpenOffice.org would be ported to > GNOME and become, if not in name then certainly in implementation, "GNOME > Office".
While this is all technically true, I think it's somewhat misleading, based on my recollections, and what I could find in a brief browse of the mailing list archives. There was much clearer leadership in the community then, but I do not believe that the community came to a conclusion that we would cede development of a GNOME office to OpenOffice.org. My impression of what happened was more that the community never got a cohesive and self-sustaining effort going to make a GNOME Office suite happen. Hopefully it doesn't sound like I'm picking nits here. > The dudes who work on the GTK+/GNOME AbiWord frontend are certainly involved > in the GNOME community, Jody has his little team working on Gnumeric, the > GNOME-DB team are largely focused on their platform stuff now, Glom is not > totally associated with "GNOME Office" but is looking very promising as a > database component, and a few projects have popped up here to do things like > presentations without getting very far -- but none of these have really had > the primary support of distributions or the GNOME community in general for a > while now. We don't even have a GNOME Office release suite to ship every six > months (not for lack of encouragement or trying though). > > So although there will be a few people up in arms if I describe this as a > "storm in a teacup", what do they seriously think we have to gain by making > *political* statements about ODF or OOXML when it's not massively relevant > to the GNOME community in the first place? If the GNOME Foundation made a > profound statement on the legitimacy of OOXML, it would be about as helpful > as a flame from some random commenter on a news website. Given that, on the > whole, we are not office/productivity software practitioners, our *political > opinions* on those issues don't carry a lot of weight. So why should we be > pushed or bullied into making them? > > What's relevant here is that we have helped a member of the GNOME community > to achieve his aims in support of his work on Free Software, and that there > is legitimate disagreement about whether that demonstrates *passive* support > for an unpopular company and format. We don't think that's the case, but we > accept differing opinions on the matter. Other commentators have been less > tolerant in this regard, and that is disappointing. Well said! Thank you. Greg _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list