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

low expectations

[jodonn]

We seem to have the opposite problem--expectations that are too low. I work as a software consultant doing J2EE applications. Often when we find ourselves dealing with a client who needs a small-scale web application done, we lay out their options for servers and pre-built solutions and they automatically reject all the free ones.

For some reason they have concerns about reliability. They'd rather pay $30K per CPU for BEA WebLogic then download JBoss for nothing, even if they only plan on supporting 100 users. I don't claim to understand it myself, but in corporate circles open source software has this stigma attached to it.

If I had a $ for every time I had this argument

[skrowl]

at 3 AM at Perkins or Dennys... I'd be rich.

This is THE major problem with Open Source software. Since you can't make money with it, you can't commit yourself to it full time. Therefore you get a whole bunch of people who sorta work on it rather than a real programming team.

What does this get you? Products like Abiword that, while nice, admit publically that they can't compete.

What you linux kids need is a micropayment system or SOME kind of way to support your "Forget capitalism, I must give away the product of hours and hour of my work" attitude. If you could make $40K/year while working on your open project, you could do it full time! THEN we'd see some nice word processors, web browsers, etc. for Linux and *BSD. Please don't moderate this down to troll or flaimbait as it raises very real points.