On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, Alan Horkan wrote:
Seemed like they were mostly interested in getting us to use their libs and making a plugin so to give graphics editing capabilities for the other apps. So other than the libs (which we can use anyway regardless), it wasn't clear what benefit Inkscape would get..
The benifits for open source developers in technical are not very big, these groupings are mostly about marketing.
Yeah, possibly, although I haven't really gotten a big impression about the marketing approach. Also, we seem to be getting word out about Inkscape at about the "right" pace - not too much, but enough to keep interest and new developers up.
The notion of being part of Gnome Office was just because there was no 'Creative Suite'. Really it makes most sense to have Inkscape and the Gimp work well together.
*Nod* Yeah, you're right, interoperability is important with other applications, and we especially want to be able to communicate well with the other graphics apps. We've been moving in that direction with things like file formats and investigating SVG incompatibilities, so hopefully this'll get a lot of improvements.
The whole idea of a Creative Suite is so much about branding and packaging that it is almost meaningless in a linux distribution. If you are selling your software packing all together and offering a bulk discount to keep users on your less popurlar products by leveraging the better ones makes sense. If you have gone to the trouble of integrating things it makes sense to use that to help market your product, but of course when you are not heavily marketing your product it is moot.
Yeah I think you have a good point - suites make sense from a marketing perspective when you're selling the software, but in our situation most of the apps are included with the linux distro anyway. I'm really more concerned about being excluded just because a given user thinks, "Oh, I'm going to use OpenOffice so I'll unload all these GnomeOffice apps."
I dunno, it seems like the best thing for Inkscape is to try to be a good app that'd work okay with whatever suite.
Yeah of course, I guess I've made to much of a minor issue.
My point in brining up Gnome Office is to make sure that thinks like the shared canvas, cut/paste, drag/drop are somewhere on the roadmap and that some consideration is given to sharing standards (gnome-office is looking to have some sort of plugin standard too they just haven't gotten around to it yet either).
Yeah you're right, we do need to put attention to that. I'd actually like to see if there's a lower level set of standards to connect to... It'd be great if we could do these things in a way that's not Gnome specific but that would work equally well in KDE or generic X environments.
Bryce