John Meyer wrote:
I could go with that, if it wasn't for the fact that on several lists that I am on I've seen people saying that open source products such as OpenOffice and Linux need to make inroads in the desktop market. Added to the fact is that there are people that are trying to convince their organizations to use OpenOffice. That means competing with MS Office, and as such, you're going to be going against them feature to feature. Outlook adds a whole slew of features that right now OO can't offer.
Evolution aims to offer them.
Now I am with you in that I like the fact that I can use Thunderbird or Evolution or whatnot. But I'm also looking at it from the guy who has no concept of office suites other than Microsoft and is thinking of using open office. One of his questions inevitably will be, well, that's nice, but how about Outlook?
Evolution. Again, OOo doesn't aim to clone MS Office. Perhaps some users would like it if this *were* the case, but it's not. The goals of OOo are to provide certain office functionality, not to look and act exactly like MS Office.
And who says we have to reinvent the wheel? Would it be so bad, for instance, if Evolution was merged into OpenOffice, to pick an example out of the air?
I don't think that's going to happen. For one thing, OpenOffice uses it's own GUI toolkit / rendering engine. Evolution uses gtk+. But there is no *point* in merging the 2 projects. They have different goals, different management structures, different developers, different release timelines.
Suggesting that the OpenOffice project absorbs the Evolution project is like suggesting that General Motors absorbs Rayband, because when people drive Fords, *some* of them like to have Rayband sunglasses on. Sure, maybe they DO like to wear sunglasses while driving their car, but that's no reason to merge the production of the two. Do I need to buy another Ford when I sit on my Rayband sunglasses? Hope not.
But you can merge the *distribution* of the 2 ... particularly in our case with open-source software. So collect all the MS Office - killing apps you can find, whack them on a CD, and start distributing them.
For the people who don't "get it" to the point that they refuse to download 2 separate open-source projects, purely because they're not 1 project, I say: Continue using MS Office.
-- Daniel Kasak IT Developer NUS Consulting Group Level 5, 77 Pacific Highway North Sydney, NSW, Australia 2060 T: (+61) 2 9922-7676 / F: (+61) 2 9922 7989 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] website: http://www.nusconsulting.com.au --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
