I am owing thanks to the Lord God Almighty for being merciful and gracious with me. He extended his hand over me and my family and accompanied us through the desert of the year 2006. He blessed us abundantly and exceedingly above all we could ever hope for. I am writing this because I want to give all the honour and all the glory to The One Who deserves it in first place.
I want to thank also the Novell OpenOffice.org Team for having considered me with favour for a position of Software engineer working on interoperability issues between MS Office and OpenOffice.org. I am excited to see my hobby activity becoming my regular job. I cannot thank you enough, guys, for giving me an opportunity to work full-time on this great FOSS project.
I want to give my thanks also to other people who were ready to help me throughout 2006: Sophie Gauthier, the lead of OOo French native language project, Mathias Bauer, former framework and current sw lead (and friend), Thorsten Behrens, the gsl co-lead (and a great person and friend), Marc "uwog" Maurer and Dom Lachowitz, AbiWord admins and fine hackers (and helpful friends), and to all those people from OpenOffice.org, AbiWord and libwp* projects that were very supportive in action and in kind words: Rob, Sum1 (really SomeOne), Will, Andrew, Ariya, Pavel, Caolan, Heiner, Stefan, Eric and all those whose names I might have forgotten to put down here. Thanks, good pexcitingeople, for your willingness to put hand in fire for a TrainedMonkey and to help and encourage him. I really appreciate!
Last, but in no way least, I want to thank particulary Michael Meeks, Distinguished Engineer and "hacker extraordinaire", for injecting in me the uncurable virus of OpenOffice.org. He helped me to enter the community. Thanks, dudie, for guiding and supporting me and for being a friend inspite of my big mouth!
I am looking forward to advancing the cause of the Free Desktop inside of a company that believes and puts in practice what it preaches.
