We are a research team from the Dept. of Informatics (that's CS to
you in the US) at the Institute of Technology, Bandung in Indonesia.
Recently we've received a government grant to start a project called
'FreeOffice', which is literally meant to replace pirated copies of
MS Office.
The goals are open source and cross-platform, specifically Win32 and
Linux (we need to replace also the Win32 OS, as it is also mostly
pirated). We also plan a full suite.
So, in short, we come across AbiSource and its AbiWord at 0.7.5, and
have since played with it. Since our goals are mutual, it is natural
that we'd like to join forces with you in creating an open source
office suite. We have several academic staff as part-time software
engineers on the projects, and plan to hire full-time programmers,
and of course we also have those hordes of CS students you mentioned.
Now, on to some technicalities. I have browsed the entire mailing
list archive and tried to catch all the important discussion, but I
may have missed something, so feel free to include a link to the
relevant part of the archive if needed:
* Helping with AbiWord
This is clear enough, what with the POWs etc. We'll try to help
spread the word in our institution.
* wxWin vs. AbiSource framework
At first we wondered why AbiSource didn't use wxWin, since in our
initial research we found that first and thought it would be perfect,
but after reading the long discussion on the list regarding the
matter, it has cleared some of that confusion. As a result, we are
strongly considering taking up the challenge of porting AbiWord to
wxWin. I particularly do not think it is too late yet; in terms of
AbiWord, maybe yes, but in terms of the whole suite (spreadsheet,
presentation, database etc) it is still quite early. Another reason
is that wxWin is more documented that Abi framework, and the approach
is more cleaner, in our opinion, in terms of ratio of XP and non-XP
code (that is, we were surprised at the amount of /win and /unix code
as compared to /xp code on the src tree).
* Other parts of the suite
We have assigned people to start thinking about the spreadsheet,
presentation, and database. Is there any way we can collaborate on
this? We may be able to accelerate development in this area if we
work together, or maybe we can even take over on this area.
Again, as I am new to this list, some of the issues above may have
been discussed, so I apologize if it seems redundant.
In conclusion, we are trying to find the best way to find a sinergy
between these efforts.
Thank you and please excuse the English.
-- Perry Ismangil