[LINK] AbiWord up

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

AbiWord up
Booms come and busts go, but open-source developers keep improving the
alternatives to Microsoft's "standards."
By Andrew Leonard
Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/leon/2002/11/15/abiword/index.html
Nov. 15, 2002

The community of software developers who hang out on the IRC chat channel
#abiword is small; the number of nicknames registered as present rarely
breaks two dozen. But the room is open, and active, 24/7, 365 days a year,
because the membership stretches from Australia to France. When the hackers
in Cambridge, Mass., finally drag themselves away from their terminals to
crash, their counterparts in Melbourne are just settling in for some
serious coding and chatting.

#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.

Like so many software start-ups in those hothouse days, AbiSource was
aiming for the big score, the IPO that would catapult it to financial
heights. I was dubious. While the free-software approach made obvious sense
for those working in the truly geeky domains of software -- Web servers,
mail-transport applications, operating systems -- I just couldn't see the
business model in supporting a free-software word processor, and I was
skeptical that building such an application would generate the kind of
developer enthusiasm that projects like Linux or Apache enjoyed.

It's one thing to hack an operating system kernel, but endlessly tinkering
with file formats? Who wants to do that? It was all well and good to dream
of world domination, but free software's chances of challenging Microsoft
for desktop supremacy were slim, I thought.

I was right -- but also very, very wrong. As it turned out, venture
capitalists agreed with the thesis that a free word processor did not sound
like a hot IPO slam-dunk. After sinking half a million dollars into the
project, AbiSource gave up, changed its name to SourceGear, turned the code
over to the free-software developer community, and looked for other ways to
make money. (Which, by the way, it is apparently doing with some success.
In its October issue, Inc magazine named SourceGear one of the
fastest-growing privately held companies in America.)

At the same time, without any corporate backing, AbiWord has flourished. At
the AbiSource Web site, anyone can download a perfectly usable
cross-platform word processor. It's unlikely ever to match Microsoft Word
feature for feature, and it still lacks in some prime-time aspects, but for
most normal purposes, it's good enough.

And as is free software's habit, it's getting better all the time. Bit by
bit, patch by patch, revision by revision, AbiWord is reaching the point
where it just works. Not because there's money to be made, and not even
because its developers necessarily believe that free software will
inevitably conquer all. They're doing it, as Eric Sink, the founder of
AbiSource, observes, "because it's fun." They're doing it because, while
booms and busts come and go, hackers have to hack.

Martin Sevior, an experimental particle physicist at the University of
Melbourne, in Australia, is one of the lead developers of this hardy band.
He's not a typical member -- he's 43, which, he acknowledges, makes him
"quite old for an open-source developer." For months, Sevior, who sees his
hacking as the kind of "contribution to the community" that should be
expected of an academic, has been focusing on the troublesome task of
getting tables to work in AbiWord.

A word processor that cannot display tables, says Sink, just isn't
"credible." Sevior agrees, but he thinks he has the problem licked. "We're
not finished," he says, "but the end is clearly in sight."

Sevior started playing with computers in the late '70s. He began running
Linux in 1993. But while he was happy writing his papers using the LaTex
word processing program popular with scientists, he found that he was
frequently receiving Microsoft Word documents from "admin types in my
university."

"It was a real pain to read these," he says. Every time he found a solution
that would work on his Linux system, Microsoft would upgrade its file
formats and he'd be stuck again.

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Finally he stumbled upon AbiWord. It imported documents that other
free-software applications were choking on. It looked good on his Linux
box. It was moving forward with admirable rapidity. "I started lurking on
their mailing list and was impressed with how people would out-of-the-blue
announce a patch for a really cool feature and then after a day or two it
would be incorporated into the code base."

So he jumped in, feet first. "I really liked the AbiWord community, so
during a vacation in 1999 I dived in and started to learn how the program
worked and to start hacking."

He's never regretted the move. "We have a fantastic team of programmers
working together on AbiWord," he says. "It truly has been a very enriching
experience working with them. I've learned so much and have had so much fun
along the way too. It really is wonderful to work with the brightest people
on the planet."

During the dot-com boom, when hundreds of millions of dollars were being
thrown at software start-ups, and anyone with a passing familiarity with
Linux or Perl, it seemed, could walk right into a lucrative job, the
overall production of free and open-source software skyrocketed, subsidized
by the deep pockets of companies such as VA Linux. After the bust, I don't
think I was alone in wondering what would happen. Would development
momentum be sustained, or would free software, after having hit a peak of
media and investor attention, sink back into obscurity, never again to
challenge the powers that be?

The progress visible in a project like AbiWord, or its close GNOME
relation, the Gnumeric spreadsheet, or the suite of office productivity
apps that are part of the KDE desktop, or a host of other efforts, is
sending a clear signal that the bust and boom were, at most, a distraction.
And in an ironic twist, the ups and downs of the tech economy don't have
the kind of effect you might imagine on free-software production:
Unemployed programmers have even more time to hack than employed software
engineers.

Not only is contributing to a free-software project a good way to keep your
skills sharp and build a résumé, but, Eric Sink observes, "People keep
doing it because they like doing it. It compares very, very favorably to
working for stupid corporations who ask developers to build projects that
they then throw away, or to writing really good code and than have bad
marketing put in front of it. Those kinds of things are very unsatisfactory
for developers."

What is satisfactory is to receive the plaudits of your peers and to create
code that people actually use. It's not about beating down Bill Gates
(although Microsoft, by every indication, is increasingly obsessed with
beating down free software), it's not about making oodles of bucks, it's
not even about being the best.

At one juncture in the nonstop get-together that is #abiword, one
contributor to the effort had a moment of near despair as he became
overwhelmed by the magnitude of a task he was trying to solve. Another
developer, Dom Lachowicz, who along with Sevior is one of the primary
engines of AbiWord's locomotion, reached out a soothing hand.

"Try not to feel discouraged or burned out," he typed. "Focus on the things
that make you feel good. Ignore the noise."

Sage words from a young programmer. And worth savoring. Because, in the
end, seen from the perspective of a hacker trying to get something to work,
all the rhetoric about world domination, about booms and busts and IPOs and
market share, is just noise. Whereas the camaraderie of developers sharing
their anxieties and triumphs, working together to solve problems -- the
chitchat that fills the hours spent scrolling down the terminal windows of
the hackers hanging out in #abiword -- that's sweet music.

-- 
Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn't always have to be
their top priority
--William Arthur Ward

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd@austarmetro.com.au