On Sun, 1 Aug 2004, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 17:24:56 -0700 (PDT) From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] GNOME HIG
On Sun, 1 Aug 2004, Alan Horkan wrote:
You are thinking in terms of what would be most useful to the developers, a graphics or creative suite is a user focussed idea. Idea like the Gnome Desktop or a Graphics Suite are high level groupings and I dont think they in any way preclude working closely with Xorg as well.
I feel I must say again that being part of the Gnome community really does not mean you have to add Gnome specific dependancies or in any way neglect cross platform development.
Hmm, maybe that's true in theory, but that wasn't the sense I got.
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.
The things Gnome Office wants from Inkscape (reuse of libraries, a better vector canvas they can share, etc) are things that are planned for the long term anyway (I'm basing this on the roadmap).
If being part of an office suite is helpful for users,
Given that Gnome-office is very much focussed on Abiword and Gnumeric (and libgda) at the moment would not make sense for Inkscape to be part of Gnome Office.
If Gnome Office were much broader it might make some sense, I mean Microsoft inlcude Visio in some versions of Office. Gnome Office was supposed to be about getting different applications to interoperate and share code but that happend more on a direct app to app basis rather than through Gnome Office specifically bring in new develoepers. Gnome Office provide a concept, a convenient banner, and regular reminder of the need for improved integration more than anything else. Only since OpenOffice came to dominate has Gnome Office refocussed and made moves to better integrate a few apps.
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.
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. If you are using something like apt-get it is just be a shorthand for downloading more than one application at once, and if you use a boxed set linux distribution everything is already bundled together.
I realise it is not a big deal.
then wouldn't OpenOffice be the suite to join?
(differnt toolkit, and it already has a Drawing appliction so no)
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). I just want to make sure the options are considered, if it seems like I'm trying to burden Inkscape with too many short term expections then I apologise for that but I do have big expectations for Inkscape in the long term. I hope to be using Inkscape for years to come.
If there'd be something specific to gain from joining a suite, great, but if it only means more development expectations... well we've already got a lot to do...
I'd best stop distracting you from it, hadn't I ;)
- Alan