--This list is growing fairly sizable, and the number of subscribers far outweighs the number of active AbiWord developers. That's OK, not everyone has the same amount of coding time to put into a given Open Source project.
However, I'd like to challenge each of you to help boost the pace of development on AbiWord by devoting a little time over the next week or so as follows:
the steps --------- 1. Remember why *you* think AbiWord is such a cool project. Reasons vary from person to person, and might include:
- it's *the* canonical desktop GUI application that everyone needs - it's GPL, which is as Open Source as you can get - it's cross-platform "done right" - it's easily localized to my language of choice - it runs on my preferred platform / hardware combination - it already works quite well, but there's plenty of meaty work left - etc.
The important thing is to zero in on whatever aspect(s) *you* are most passionate about.
2. Identify at least one Computer Science program that you're affiliated with. The more people you personally know there, the better.
3. Take the passion you've got from step 1, and (politely) *tell* the folks at the CS program in step 2 why you're so enthusiastic about it. Ideally, you'd contact the professor(s) at that school who supervise student projects related to GUI development.
Their students could use real-world professional experience working:
- in a large codebase, - as part of a team, - on consumer-grade software,
and we need a fraction of them to decide to work on features for AbiWord instead of some toy project nobody will ever use.
4. Finally, post a "brag note" back to this list summarizing how successful your one-to-one contacts have been. SHAZAM! (In this case, ZAP notes aren't really needed, since duplicated efforts are unlikely.)
the goal -------- Every CS program has OS researchers tinkering with Linux, and we want to make sure that their GUI counterparts consider doing the same thing.
Given the number of folks on this list and their geographical distribution, we can probably cover most of the major CS programs with personal introductions, so long as each of us does their part.
Thanks, Paul
PS: For more background on the whole POW / ZAP / SHAZAM concept, see the following introduction:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/September/0097.html