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Comment by gkop | Hacker News Reader

Worth mentioning Gnumeric, a nice and clean spreadsheet counterpart to AbiWord.

Both part of "Gnome Office" along with a few other applications as native GTK+ office applications. Though I guess it's probably be more of a collection than a well connected suite like MS Office, LibreOffice or even whatever KOffice is called these days.

The GNOME project decided not to be serious with GNOME Office years and years ago.

Imagine if they had put their effort into it though? Almost certainly they would have been at the forefront of desktop options and a good likelihood as a candidate for corporations.

You know it is hard to order people to do something when they aren't paid. Even project like OpenOffice.org that had commercial venture had hardship with funding. Oracle cancelled it, Novell cancelled it, IBM do whatever they want, etc.

All in all, GNOME Office didn't happen. Some bits did, though. AbiWord was always broader than GNOME. And Gnumeric is great IMHO.

And people see the future in the cloud.

Except there was a group of people who did want to do it - Abi was a company at one point! But the Gnome guys decided to deemphasise it - that was the problem.

I was in that group. There is so much that can be done just like that.

And Abi as a company was long gone by that time.

It became clear to me that there isn't any money to be made in desktop FOSS software, as most users either pay for their tools, or end up pirating or using FOSS software if they don't plan to spend any money.

Desktop software just isn't the same as sellling consulting, trainings or SaaS licenses behind browser paywalls that server based software enjoys.

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