fedora-devel-list Digest, Vol 12, Issue 104

[Martin Sevior]

On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 11:06 -0500, fedora-devel-list-request at redhat.com 
> -jef"No one in the sum total of human history has ever felt a deeper
> rage than what I felt when oneko was ripped out of rhl. I fell into a
> darkness, deep and bottomless. I wandered the earth, lost and forlorn
> searching for meaning. I swore an oath to seek my revenge on those who
> have hurt me so. I have fought a daily struggle to break open the Red
> gates so that I have can get oneko back into distribution. And now
> that Fedora Extras is finally here and my goal is at hand, its not so
> compelling anymore cuz xdesktopwaves is sooo much cooler."spaleta

My thoughts exactly, except that nothing will be cooler than AbiWord :-)

OK there are several things about this series of posts from me. 

If I just went quietly into the night, people would think I don't care. 

I do care.

Now I'll plug AbiWord-2.2 since almost no one here has tried it.

The AbiWord community is as vibrant as ever. We committed over 300,000
LOC of changes to the code base over 14 months to produce AbiWord-2.2.
We implemented all sorts of cool stuff that neither MS Word or OOo has.
We implemented features that make the users job of creating documents
easier and more fun. We want that code to be seen and used and
appreciated by as many people as possible. We're in a position to be
widely deployed across heterogenic communities like Universities and
Schools since we have Windows, Mac and Linux clients. 

We're seeing substantial growth in our direct download stats and hits on
our website from outside the Linux world.

Having released 2.2 we've started work on 2.4 and have already added a
number of new features while steadily fixing bugs in 2.2.

I bought into the idea of Fedora as a community project with real
support for grass roots developers and users. What I see are corporate
backed projects pushing the grass roots projects out. I also see these
projects pushing all the fun stuff out too. 

Fedora has to be careful about maintaining relevance for your average
computer enthusiast. As someone else has said if we wanted a boring,
corporate supported OS with excellent Java support we'd download Solaris
10.

Martin