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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: K abiword port
From:       Andreas Pour <pour () mieterra ! com>
Date:       1999-05-24 2:26:40
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Matthias Ettrich wrote:

[ ... ]

> Offtopic: With abiword and gnumeric there are now two overhyped gtk projects
> that both have a far superior counterpart in the KDE office suite. We are sort
> of unbeatable when it comes to coding, our marketing however, seems to need
> vastly improvements :-(

The problem here is not marketing but the development model:  there has no
"stable"/beta release of KOffice AFAIK.

    *  Abiword has made too many releases to count (freshmeat index for it is
currently broken so I cannot tell for sure, but the web site
(http://www.abisource.com/free.phtml) says "[AbiWord]  is a fully-functional word
processor with all the features intact").
    *  Gnumeric has 9 announcements of releases on freshmeat
(http://freshmeat.net/appindex/1998/09/30/907192372.html), none of which AFAIK was
dubbed a development release.  The web site admits lots of work is left to do on
it, but the freshmeat announcements say "Gnumeric is a powerful and easy to use
spreadsheet program from the GNOME project. The goal for this spreadsheet is to
compete with the commercial offerings. Users of Excel should be already familiar
with Gnumeric advanced features."
    *  For KOffice, there has been one freshmeat announcement (last October).  The
web site (http://koffice.kde.org/) says "All KOffice components are still in alpha
stage."  And despite numerous sustained efforts and the kind attention of some
developers I for one have not been able to compile koffice.

Since KOffice has now switched to Qt2.0, I can only assume it will be a long time
before there will be a "stable" release.

So, it is not really a question of marketing, but the fact that there is nothing to
market.  If the koffice developers give the kde-pr team a stable release, don't
worry, we will market it!  But if the koffice developers keep working on
implementing new features (like moving to Qt2.0) before worrying about making a
stable release, there simply is nothing to market.

NOTE:  This is *not* meant to criticize koffice developers.  They are of course
free to choose whatever development model they wish.  I am just trying to clarify
the source of the observed phenomenon that the inferior projects get more
attention, is all :-).  On the other hand, I don't want to discount the value of
"mindshare".

Regards,

Andreas Pour

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