Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

L'actu par Mac4Ever (fr) made a call for developer to develop some completely useless software for MacOS X: a screen saver intended to be as a demo. Aren't there more urgent things to do like helping AbiWord native Cocoa port to be more polished or help porting gtk+ to MacOS X without X11 so that one can port Gnumeric that is IMHO a real jewel. Most of the time, the excuse to not take part of these projects in the MacOS community is because they like making shareware and need to pay the bill.

We, the AbiWord team, have been looking for a long time for help from developers in the Mac community, without much success.

Wow. The Creative Retirement Computer Club list AbiWord on their CD. OK the version is a prehistorical 0.9.4.1, even for 2002, but that is better than nothing. I should tell them about the new one.

MaCreate features an article about BeOS. BeOS was that really innovative operating system released in the mid-90s, and designed to run on SMP machines. While this article is quite simple a briefly relate what BeOS is all about, and that all along we notice this little generiuc AbiWord icon, I noticed a huge mistake:

My favorite free word processor is AbiWord, a port of the famous KDE word processor.

AbiWord does NOT originate from KDE at all. We don't even have a KDE port, even though we'd run on KDE without any problem.

And the worse: the BeOS port of AbiWord is dead for a long time because no developer wanted to take over like if there was no longer any developer, and or the few remaining were only interested in prioprietary apps and immediate earnings by sales of licenses on a non-existing market.

BeOS could have been fantastic if it had been open-source. But that would have juste made Be Inc. business plan even harder.