DID MICROSOFT EXEC ENDORSE ABISOURCE?

A reply to the testimony of Paul Maritz

WASHINGTON, DC -- Thursday, January 28th, 1999 -- Microsoft's senior vice-president of platforms and applications, Paul Maritz, testified under oath today during the Microsoft-DOJ antitrust trial that AbiSource is developing "a very high-quality word processor".

AbiSource Responds

We're certainly flattered that Mr. Maritz chose to mention us. However, we believe his implication that our products serve as competition for Microsoft Office to be a little premature. Our research indicates that most people still prefer to use a word processor which supports page numbers, but we could be wrong. :-).

So, if you're coming to our site to find out what Mr. Maritz is all excited about, you'll have to be patient. Many of the core features of AbiWord are still under development.

Better yet, if you're a programmer, don't be patient -- grab yourself a compiler and contribute some code to AbiWord! All our code is covered under the GNU GPL, and our project uses a Bazaar development model (like the Linux project), with all interested programmers encouraged to join.

About AbiSource

AbiSource, Inc. is privately held, and was founded in January 1997 with a management and development team that has six years of prior experience working together. The AbiSource mission is to become the leading provider of Open Source, full-featured, professionally supported desktop applications.

For more information, see the AbiSource Web site at http://www.abisource.com or contact Scott Boesch at AbiSource, Inc., telephone: 217-356-0105 ext. 642; email: scott@abisource.com.

AbiSource, AbiWord, AbiSuite and the AbiSource logo are trademarks of AbiSource, Inc. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Open Source is a Certification Mark of The Open Source Initiative. Windows and Windows NT are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.