There are a few essential points that were not addressed in this thread. The fact that we do not ship any 1.8.x version compiled for MS-Windows is because we are still facing major issues. At least, print preview and contextual help don't work. When we have a decent windows version, then we can think how to make things easy for windows users. As long as it is experimental software, it might give a bad image of what free softawre is to MS-Windows users. The current development release (1.9.3) is the best we ever had for MS-Windows, but it is not a stable release, at least officially (it is not really unstable, I'm using it everyday).
Just my $.02 Best regards, Jean Le mardi 18 novembre 2008 à 20:32 -0500, Allin Cottrell a écrit : > On Wed, 19 Nov 2008, John Machin wrote: > > > On 19/11/2008 04:42, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote: > > > On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 09:34 -0800, George Dell wrote: > > >> Thank you for engaging me on this issue. While I am a deep > > >> believer in freedom as you mention it I also need to be able > > >> to have people (who understand none of the technospeak and > > >> specialized words), able to get to an installed usable > > >> version. Even your answer leaves my head swimming... > > > > Installing gnumeric is usually trivial and you don't even need > > > to go to the gnumeric web site. > > > > > > If you are using Debian... > > > > I'm not aware of any difficulty experienced by Windows users > > installing free and open software like Firefox (competes with MS > > Internet Explorer) or Openoffice.org (competes with Microsoft > > Office). Their web pages seem to be lucid enough: > > The story so far: > > * George Dell -- who is obviously (to anyone who read his original > posting) running MS Windows -- remarks on the difficulty of > installing current gnumeric (or rather, finding an installer for > current gnumeric). > > * Andreas G offers a basically irrelevant response that assumes a > Linux user. > > * John Machin points out that some other free software projects, > in contrast to gnumeric, offer a relatively easy installation path > for users of MS Windows. > > My 2 cents: It's a "philosophical" issue and there's no single > right answer. Many if not most developers of free software abhor > MS Windows (yes, I'm speaking for myself here!), yet we have to > recognize that most computer users still run Windows. Perhaps we > think they ought to get a clue and use something better than > Windows (as I do). At the same time, if we think our program is > really good, we probably want to make it available to people who > persist in running Windows. > > This is clear: No free software project "owes the world" an MS > Windows version. But if a project such as gnumeric _does_ decide > to make an such a version available, then IMO it should do so with > good grace. By this I mean, the MS Windows version should be > easily identifiable by Windows-users who visit the project's > website looking for a download: "Installer for MS Windows HERE..." > > Allin Cottrell > _______________________________________________ > gnumeric-list mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list > _______________________________________________ gnumeric-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
