AbiWord Weekly News #115 by Eric A. Zen

“Dom Lachowicz has been a pillar of the AbiWord community for
the longest time. Acting as Mayor and Treasurer, he has helped
guide this hamlet to the greater era just ahead. He is also,
perhaps, too trusting. For nearly a month, he’s had faith that,
after a recent disaster, our community would be redeemed. For
nearly a month, he’s asked us to have that faith, but that faith
has been broken.

“It was nearly one month ago, the AbiFund, which has quietly
asked for donations on the bottom of this newsletter since before
its XHTML age, has been robbed. The concept of Open Source
Software, or Free Software, has not been about making money. It has
been about community support. The AbiWord project has only asked
for donations for the cost of bringing to the many the product: a
small, fast and stable word processing tool that almost anyone can
use.

“Bandwidth, maintenance, occasional hardware replacement and,
from time to time, getting a representative to a convention or
meeting is all this fund has been able to be used for in the most
recent of times. Our coffers flowed not with millions of venture
capital, but a small sum of US$800 (eight hundred). But that number
is significantly reduced to a mere US$200 (two hundred). If one
major component of NYORP (the AbiServer) become damaged, that can
be handled, but if two were, that may not be the case. Any
significant problems that should arise now could be costly to the
AbiWord community, like a disease on drought-surviving crop…”

Complete
Story