Gnumeric Turns 5

Jody Goldberg writes "Five years ago, Miguel committed the first code for Gnumeric to CVS. In a testament to the quality of the code several lines are still in use. Since that time the project has grown to more than 300,000 lines and now supports all 325 worksheet functions in MS Excel, plus almost 100 more. This seemed like a good time to thank all the people who have contributed to Gnumeric over the years. We're about to start the run up to the the next stable release which will be out in a few weeks and we look forward to continuing work with GNOME, and the community at large to produce the most powerful spreadsheet in the world."

Comments

Re:Comparing linux software to windows

[rzbx]

Why is it bad to compare OSS software with a proprietary counterpart? I think it gives those that don't know about the software a chance to see how they compare.
If someone for example uses, MS Excel and wants to switch to the OpenOffice equivalent or Gnumeric in this instance, then they could see before hand if it contains all of the features they use frequently. At the same time it could show them features they have always wanted but could not get with the proprietary software. We compare things all the time. Is it really so wrong to do it with software?

Not a Clone

[Jody Goldberg]

Our goal is to produce a great spreadsheet.

Compatibility with existing products is required for people to be able to transition. We already have significantly better analytics than MS Excel. Over time we hope to become a superset of it in other areas too.

Desktop-specific afiliation

[thelandp]

Okay this may be a little off-topic, but Gnumeric is a perfect example of what this comment is about.
I'm concerned that so open source apps written these days have names that demonstrate their affiliation with a particular desktop. Having names that begin with "gn" of "K" is a kind of flag waving that shows which desktop application framework was used (gnome or KDE).
Ideally the user should be able to (and usually can) run apps using either framework on any desktop. But when the name has "gn" for example, are they saying "well yes you could probably run it in KDE but it's a gnome app so maybe you're better off running it in gnome..."
Why is their so much tribalism? I think it's an important step in the maturity of Linux or Open Source in general to get to a point where the particular implementation (gnome or KDE) of any given layer (the desktop) has NO impact on other layers (the application) and so the title of the app should not even need to provide any hint of affiliation with a particular brand of in another layer.

Happy Birthday Gnumeric, looks like a great program. But as a user I don't think I should need to know about it's internal implementation thanks.