Abiword: Support Expectations

bockman writes "Abiword developers have put up a letter, explaining what they expect from their user community and what the community should (and should not) expect from a volunteer-based open source software project like theirs. A much needed reality-check in these times when a large number of non-developers have joined the Linux users world." This is a must read for anyone who uses any open source software.

Comments

Re:There Must Be Higher Excpectations

[dominator]

Huh?

Ok, I'm the author/maintainer of wvWare - another MSWord parsing thing (www.wvware.com) and lead developer/maintainer of AbiWord. What are you talking about?

AbiWord isn't trying to build a word processor around any particular format. We have an extremely generic import/export mechanism that I co-authored, so that input and output can be trivially done to/from any format. We actually support more unique formats on the market than most common commercial word processors...

But import/export is a very boring and uniteresting part of a Word Processor. All of the interesting stuff goes on down in our formatting and rendering classes. You clearly don't know what you're talking about.

And by the way, the MSWord document format is insanely difficult for mere mortals to understand. If you are indeed serious about this, come help out Werner and myself on wv or wv2 instead of re-duplicating our efforts.

Please mod this troll down.

Dom Lachowicz
cinamod@hotmail.com
AbiWord and wvWare Maintainer/Lead Developer

Re:I have ony one request for all developers

[Kiwi]

Unlike proprietary software development (Amokscience appears to be a proprietary software developer who does not understand how the bazaar model of open source development works), where companies go through extensive SQA before making a release available, open-source development releases a pre-1.0 release, which the public SQAs.

If AbiWord was a proprietary software product, the only people who would be using AbiWord right now would be SQA testers. Thankfully, AbiWord is open-source, which allows people like me to use it before its formal 1.0 release.

- Sam