On Mon, 24 May 1999, Andrew Wansink wrote:
> Just a quick note to announce that I have started work on a port of 
> abiword to kde.  It is just a ui at this stage but anyone interested in 
> helping out in the future is welcome to drop me a note.

Without wanting to discourage you: Do you really think that's worth it?
I mean, Abiword right now can't do even half of what kword can do!
Why fiddle around with these over-hyped C-sources without functionality, if
kword is nicer designed, more powerful and object-oriented?

On the other hand: It's always nice to have a better version of some free
software, the k-version will at least have reasonable usable widgets. But you
may want to ask abisoft on their opinion regarding a port first. Last time I
ported the gimp to KDE, I got some heavy critisicm, mainly from Scott Goehring, 
president of http://www.wilberworks.com/ . The reason is obvious: they want
to earn money with support and customization, a better and therefore easier
useable and customizable GIMP will harm their business. They same _may_ apply to
Abisoft since they want to earn money in the traditional GNU way as well
(cynics call that business model "ship crappy stuff and charge for support" ;-)

Offtopic: With abiword and gnumeric there are now two overhyped gtk projects
that both have a far superior counterpart in the KDE office suite. We are sort
of unbeatable when it comes to coding, our marketing however, seems to need
vastly improvements :-(


  Matthias


> 
> andrew wansink