You've had it too, right? An awesome dream that could change your life forever. That's what Abillo is, a dream of passionate open source professionals. We're building our dream, for us and for you!.

Abillo frequently asked questions and answers

In the past few weeks we have seen some questions appear on twitter and some people have sent us questions by mail. We have answered all of them in the best way in which we can. We have collected the most frequently asked questions into this blog post as an attempt to answer the most pressing questions about Abillo.

Q : What is Abillo?

A : Abillo is the company we started to commercially support the creation of our dream Open Source Project.

Q : Why can't you give more details about Abillo?

A : Due to the fact that Abillo is a commercial endeavor, we can't give every detail away just yet... We would love to be able to tell you everything right now, but we hope that you will understand and be patient.

Q : What does Abillo mean?

A : Abillo is a combination of "Ability" and "Love"; we love the power to be able to perform.

Q : Who are the people behind Abillo?

A : At this time there are four people working on Abillo: Anthony Ferrara, Arno Zijlstra, Robin Muilwijk and Wilco Jansen.

Q : Is Abillo a fork of an existing project?

A : No, Abillo is a new business, project and codebase completely built from scratch. We have our own clear and very innovative ideas about what we are building, so we have decided to start with a clean slate.

Q : When will you be ready to launch?

A : We are not ready yet, but we are working on it very hard. It will take a few months for sure, and we want things to be of very high quality when we offer it to the public. In the mean time you can follow us on twitter, on the Abillo site blog and subscribe by email. We will post news and information when ever we can.

Q : Will Abillo be Open Source and free?

A : Yes, Abillo products will carry an Open Source license. We are presently evaluating which license fits our business model model best, but it will be open source. We strive to build a solid and profitable business platform to enable us to better support our free offerings and community efforts.

We hope this short question and answer blog clears up some things for you. Feel free to send any additional questions that you may have to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

To end this post, we'd like to thank everyone who has sent us thumbs-up and support offerings. We'll need your help when we are ready with creating a solid base for the project. For now, we ask that you stay patient, and stay tuned.

Why Abillo and why join the Open Source Business Foundation?

We announced before that Abillo joined the Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF) and we thought we'd explain a little more about why we decided to join them.

First let's look at why we started Abillo. Abillo is the company we started to be able to build our dream project which is an Open Source Project that is built from scratch; business, community and code wise. We decided to start from scratch because it allows us to create our ultimate vision.

The Abillo name is a combination of "Ability" and "Love" and that is what we do, we love power to be able to perform. You'll find that this love will be put in all aspects of the company, project and software.

The Abillo project will focus on Open Source Business use because we've learned that a flourishing Open Source project needs a healthy financial balance-sheet to be able to support development, community efforts and the free distribution model for the software. The current markets also ask for Open Source Solutions with professional commercial support and services. These ideas brought us to finding the OSBF and seeking contact to explore our common grounds and extend our network in the direction we are going.

We've had a couple of great conversations with OSBF Chairman; Richard Seibt and decided the OSBF is a great partner for our business and project and filed for membership which was approved unanimously by the OSBF Board. We are very excited about joining. With the OSBF we have a partner for networking with other Open Source projects or solutions which may compliment the Abillo project and the OSBF has great knowledge to advice us on complicated matters.

The Abillo codebase in under steady development but releasing it to the public will take several months for sure. Not only does our software require lots of code written but our quality demands are very high. We won't release until we can offer the community and customers a quality product and infrastructure to serve the product. Before public launch however, we will probably do a Beta testing round with a selection of people following and supporting us to get feed-back on the running products.

Our plan is to blog regularly with "State of development" or "State of project" posts and plan on asking for feed-back in the near future in certain area's to hear you. So keep following and support us on our journey.

Abillo Joins Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF)

Abillo has joined the OSBF (Open Source Business Foundation). As you can read from the "about" section on the OSBF website, it's all about driving adoption of open source solutions and technologies in business environments.

Because Abillo shares the common thoughts about Open Source being good for professional business we decided to become a member of the foundation. We hope this will both make the foundation stronger by supporting their efforts and build the Abillo business network which will be good for our project (and in turn, you).

About the OSBF

The Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF, www.osbf.de), founded in Nuremberg in May 2006, is a European-wide open source network. The members of OSBF are companies, institutions and persons inspired by open source software. The activities of the network always focus on the business benefits of open source software. The Articles of Association of OSBF accordingly define the purpose of the association as strengthening the open source software and service industry and creating and safeguarding jobs in the development and service sectors.

The OSBF also has political tasks and goals. The importance of open source software is to be improved by actively coordinating opinion-making among OSBF members and by lobbying third parties such as associations and politics. Typical fields of activity are improving the political framework for the use of open source software, legal aspects of patents and licenses, local authority contract awarding guidelines or promoting the use of open source software in small and medium enterprises. OSBF is to intensify dialog with ministries and political parties in Berlin and Brussels for this purpose.

Other members of the foundation include Ingres, Init, Microsoft, Novel and Open Bravo. You can find a full list of all members here.

We'll be looking out to join other great efforts that support Open Source and that can be a benefit for our project.