[scribus] The Scribus target - a question for the developers

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 21:42:37 +0100
Gustavo Homem <gustavo at angulosolido.pt> dijo:

> > Interesting thought.  And , as an ex-engineer, understandable . . . yet I
> > consider Open Office (at least the word processor) as a "finished" product.
> > Perhaps the corporate involvement in Open Office provides the additional
> > resources, of the right kind, to "finish"  the product.

> This is an interesting comment. Maybe we could breifly discuss why you 
> consider OpenOffice.org more "finished" than Scribus 1.3.3.12 (the stable 
> version).

I tend to agree that OOo is a more finished product. The reason I feel
that way is because of its standing in relation to its competitors. 

In the case of OOo, that means MS Office and WordPerfect Office. OOo
has a small but significant market share compared to those two. In fact,
there are more OOo users than users of WordPerfect Office. At my
university all machines in student computer labs have OOo installed.

Another point is the feature parity. OOo pretty well matches its
competitors feature for feature. Sure, the buttons are in different
places and the look and feel is not quite the same, but just about
anything you can do in MS Office or WordPerfect Office can also be done
in OOo.

Now compare this to Scribus. When it comes to market share vs. our
competitors we have a long way to go to catch up to OOo. And when we
compare features with our competitors, we also have quite a ways to go.

I don't meant to demean Scribus or the efforts of the developers. The
longest journey begins with a single step. They have accomplished
amazing things in the time they have been working on Scribus.