[ Thanks to Paul A. Rombouts for this
link. ]
“#abiword is a friendly, casual watering hole, a place to gossip
about upcoming exams or the perils of Microsoft Word-formatted job
applications. It’s a place to talk about a relative’s illness, or
to slap virtual backs when one of the group does something
noteworthy, such as getting accepted as a member of the Gnome
Foundation, a group of developers dedicated to making the desktop
safe for free software. And, naturally, it’s the place to share
notes on how to overcome nasty problems such as getting embedded
tables to display properly in AbiWord, a free-software word
processor.“That AbiWord even exists, much less that it is thriving through
the steady contributions of this band of programmers, is one of the
delightful mysteries of the free-software world. I can recall
wandering the LinuxWorld convention floor back in the spring of
1999 in San Jose and stopping to talk with a man from AbiSource, a
small, privately held company that was attempting to drum up
venture capital for its ambitious plan to create a free-software
office suite…”