Subject: Re: installation on slackware
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jan 11 2001 - 09:14:41 CST
On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, Thomas Fletcher wrote:
> In terms of your comments about AbiWord being the open
> source project longest in development ... I doubt that =;-)
> No open source project ever has an "end". Some of the reasons
> for a more relaxed development schedule are:
> -Word Processors aren't "sexy" as a result there is a smaller
> core set of people working on this project.
> -Core goals are "fuzzy". Since we are all volunteers there
> is a set of "goals" for release but people get diverged on
> things that catch their own interest. We aren't going to
> dictate to people what they can and can't do in their spare
> time.
> -There are other solutions available. While I believe that
> AbiWord is good now (though no argument it can get better)
> there are other solutions available for most platforms (ie
> StartOffice, WordPerfect, Applixware, LyX, Word) so people
> aren't driven by necessity as much as if there were no good
> solution.
>
Actually I think the main reason is that writing a WYSIWYG Word Processor
is a fundamentally difficult thing to do right. We changed around 50,000
lines of code between version 0.7.11 and 0.7.12 but were still about half
a dozen major features short of feature complete for 1.0.
Cheers
Martin
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