That seems unlikely to me - usually it is the reverse, and incompetent moron being fired with some made-up RIF so as to avoid problems. Some folks here have positted that the man may have been fired as part of a reduction in force, and the 'incompetence' arguement was a smokescreen. While AbiWord is a great program, it is hardly a killer app. I'm sure most people that spend the extra money on a Mac tend to either buy their own word processor, or use OOo, since it is almost out of beta for OSX. While no AbiWord on OSX is not good news, I think the actual number of users (in proportion to the total number of Mac users) who will be effected by this is very low. Once done, different groups could take the code from that suite and customize it to their hearts' content, much like what's happened with Mozilla - one browser, but many groups have taken the source code and created their own versions (like Galeon and Konqueror). To be honest, while I love choice and all the options in OSS, I think Linux in particular and OSS in particular, would be much more widely adopted (and would be much more of a competitor to Micro$oft) if, instead of having so many OSS word processors and spreadsheets, all that effort had been focused on creating one kick-ass office suite. While AbiWord was very important to me and I have nothing but the utmost respect for the programmers and people behind the project, I cannot see anyone realistically seeing it as a 'killer app.' It's a full blown office suite - if, by chance, anyone didn't know. While AbiWord has some wonderful features, OOo has a fully documented programming language and API.

However, I recently changed the entire system over to. The AbiWord programmers are great to work with and have been very kind and helpful to me.

I can't say that the overall system, and therefore my company, would never have gotten off the ground without AbiWord, but the open document format and load of command line options/commands made it possible for me to save months of work by just dropping in command line uses of AbiWord in Perl scripts. I should point out that AbiWord was a VERY integral part of the software system that got my business going.

From the cited post: ' I had no reason to be a loyal customer (sort of like I was until 1988) and offer them what could *possibly* be a killer app on

Abiword for mac os x download