Release Notes

Thank you for your interest in this release of AbiWord!


About AbiWord

AbiWord is an "Open Source" word processor.  To learn more about the concept of Open Source, you should look at <http://www.opensource.org>.  Because AbiWord is Open Source, it is freely distributable and available for use by anyone, without restrictions.  With AbiWord, there is no need to worry about piracy.  We encourage you to make as many copies as you like and to give them to your friends and colleagues.

Note that AbiWord is not "shareware".  You are under no moral or legal obligation to pay anyone for the right to use this program. If you are not familiar with this kind of software, please rest assured that there is no catch.  AbiWord is free, and it will always be free.  It is developed in a public fashion, by members of the software community from all over the world, communicating and collaborating together via the Internet.


Getting Help

There is some documentation at <http://www.abisource.com/support/>. However, due to the lack of time and people to contribute to the documentation effort, it is far from complete, and does not cover all features, including many of the new features available in the 2.x release series. Another, sometimes more useful place to get help is the AbiWord user mailing list <http://www.abisource.com/support/help/maillist.phtml>. Users are strongly encouraged to join the mailing list in order to ask and answer questions freely.  Please keep discussion limited to AbiWord related subjects.

Also, IRC provides a more real time medium of communication, and can elicit more immediate response, depending on who's online and responsive.  See <http://www.abisource.com/support/help/irc.phtml> for details.


Helping

If you would like to join the community of people who are developing AbiWord, there are lots of ways you can help, even if you are not a computer programmer.

If you are in fact a programmer, and would like to work on the project, see the developer information on our web site, join the abiword-dev mailing list, and ask what needs to be done.  There are always features or ports which need attention.

Be aware that because the site does not receive too much attention, <http://www.abisource.com/developers/> is obsolete in some areas and you will probably find the developers on list and IRC more helpful.

If you are not a programmer, you can still join the AbiWord Developer mailing list and contribute in other ways.  The easiest way to help is to simply use the program and report any bugs you find.  A tool called Bugzilla is available on our web site for exactly this purpose.

Contributions can be easily made in the areas of documentation, site maintenance, quality assurance (bug-checking, a little harder), and product promotion.  Whatever you're good at, the friendly folks on the AbiWord Developer mailing list are perfectly willing to find something for you to help with and there is always plenty to be done.  

We appreciate any help we receive.


Supported Platforms

AbiWord is a multi-platform application, meaning that it was designed to work well on multiple types of computers and operating systems. At the present time, AbiWord is supported on Windows NT (Windows XP, Vista, ...), Mac OS (see note below), Linux, a variety of other UNIX-like systems (including everything from Solaris to *BSD to RTEMS).  The BeOS port has been removed from the source tree as of July 8th 2005, the QNX port as of April 2008. If you can help us with any of these ports or provide and maintain a new one, you are more than welcome to. Other operating systems will likely be supported in the future.

The AbiWord port to Mac OS prior to OS X (Carbon) has been removed due to the extensive and unmet developer resource requirements.  However, the Mac OS X (Cocoa) port is still under development and according to its maintainer, has reached a quite usable state, though it is not quite on par with the Unix port yet.


Legalese

Copyright 1998-2009 Dom Lachowicz and other contributors

All Rights Reserved



This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA   02111-1307, USA.

AbiSource, AbiWord, and AbiSuite are trademarks of AbiSource, Inc., in the United States and other countries.  The AbiSource logos and AbiSource product and service names are also trademarks of AbiSource, Inc., which may be registered in other countries.
