So, in one of Dave Kristol's emails to HTTP-WG, he pointed out that Jeff Hostetler, late of Spyglass, now works for abiSource, Inc. What's that? http://www.abisource.com/ ...obviously enough. Eric Sink and presumably others from the (flushed) Spyglass team (itself based on what would now be called "grey" source from NCSA -- Telnet, Dicer, Mosaic) have launched a company specifically aimed at desktop applications. The first out the gate is abiWord, to be announced in a few hours at the O'Reilly/Open Source confab today (gee, I wonder if there ought to be an Open Source Journal :-) It's only a developer alpha release, naturally enough -- you can't announce a finished Open Source product, by defintion. Aimed at Linux and Win32. Mac loses again... They're writing fresh cross-platform libraries, but only those two as strategic choices. I don't fault them for that at all. [Perhaps Apple should take on the mantle of aligning Mac open source hackers and putting prize machines and, more importantly, Apple ad campaign fame on the table] http://www.abisource.com/press.phtml A nagging indicator: the initial press release talks about the *functionality* of a word processor-to-be for a bare paragraph out of pages about how cool this new business model is. Folks, I need a word processor, not a philosophy -- at least, that's the endgame: measuring by features alone, not grading on a curve because a product's "politically correct." http://www.abisource.com/dev_dumps.phtml A second nagging indicator? There are two features demonstrated in their screenshots -- illustrating the needs of the "super-nerdy" perfectly. 1) Multicolumn editable text (nice enough) and 2) a circular column (freaky deaky developer backflips). http://www.abisource.com/roadmap.phtml A third nagging indicator? The feature roadmap is a wishlist, naturally enough. It's not the kind of rigorous Project Manager warplan you'd expect from Steve McConnell's MS Press books (Code Complete, &c). The import/export is one of the most ambitious, and some of them are going to be very lossy, indeed: many of the features that make those documents work are not in the target abiWord set. And yet -- I'm pretty pumped about this effort. It's a Good Cause (TM), it's run by Smart People (TM), and it's got a scalable goal set -- not to be everything by version 1. This is the Next Step in the open source movement: deploying paid, professional product managers to own features and progress, to coordinate the feedback from the world to a coherent end. That said, one can (and must) ask of any project: Does the world need another word processor? (translation: "is MS Word a natural monopoly?") Yes, Open Source OSes need desktop apps. No, Microsoft is NOT going to port theirs. So we have a quandary: as meager as the market is, and as much as your "best" users of all those features -- people who live and die by word processing -- have moved to the closed platform already, how can abiWord mature beyond a hacker's quickie file viewer? See, part of the Open Source magic is aligning user-developers' interests with one's own. For systems-hackers, it yields programmable editors like emacs. For the scientific-hackers, it aligned around TeX. For the latest generation of Web-hackers, it ought to align around pure XML+XSL+CSS+PNG. The first two development paths have produced hypertophied specimens: awesomely powerful and aggresive entrants that destroy any competitors that come near: emacs owns coding (with vi) and TeX owns scientific documents (with FrameMaker). No one owns the "web document" -- in large part because it hasn't standardized yet. There appears to be great promise, though, for building a fresh interpretation of the office suite using the "work web" as the basic user metaphor and development architecture (see also Trellix). abiSource doesn't seem to be doing this. Yet. The beauty of the bazzar is that if the hackers want to make the ultimate Web tool, they can -- by dint of effort alone, they can control the architecture of the product and direct it towards those standards. If abiSource hasn't specified a roadmap for its internal implementation architecture (so far it's just the features), that's *OK* for an Open Source company. They don't own it; they share it. But once it ramps up, I'm hoping the abiSource PMs ride herd on it and hold to that architecture. Because, after all, the bazaar in every town square operates in the *shadow* of the cathedral. (*) Openly, Rohit Khare (*) translation: *someone's* gotta design the thing... http://www.abisource.com/dev_faq.phtml The FAQ is very interesting reading. Excerpts: Why are you doing this? If AbiWord is free, how will you make money? It is our intention that AbiWord will always be Open Source. We will be selling technical support, packaged CDROMs, manuals, companion products, and other resources. Why does AbiWord use XML as its native file format? Because we like XML. Seriously, it seemed silly to invent yet another file format, when XML provides a very nice syntactic structure for our use. There are a variety of other options that didn't make as much sense for our purposes. Why doesn't AbiWord use HTML, XSL, CSS, DSSSL, etc? HTML is a web page language. It lacks the features necessary to represent many word processing constructs. Shoehorning those features into HTML would be possible, but not pretty. CSS was used as the basis for our design. However, CSS2 has weak support for pagination, and its box model breaks down somewhat when designing algorithms for non-rectangular text flow. At the time of this writing, XSL was a moving target. We may end up moving in that direction over time. DSSSL is far too complicated for our needs. As for style sheets in general, AbiWord is a word processor, not a structured XML editor. Separation of semantic markup from formatting instructions was never a goal. Under Linux, why are you using GTK+ instead of Qt? Politics. Most of the truly nerdy open source people prefer GTK+, since Qt is not quite free enough for the deepest dogma. We want the enthusiasm of those super-geeks right from the beginning, so we are making the choice that will make them happy. Truth be told, we would like to support both. If you would like to help with a Qt port, please let us know. -- Rohit Khare -- UC Irvine -- 4K Associates -- +1-(626) 806-7574 http://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit -- http://xent.ics.uci.edu/~FoRK
