Any thoughts? Yes. Don't use Abiword 2.6.6...

I was thinking the other day what a complete shambles the Abiword project is.

There is really only one market left for a lightweight word processor like Abiword that is only moderately compatible with MS Word, and it is the mobile market. I have a tiny, Atom-based computer at home (similar in power to a netbook) running off of an 8GB USB key instead of a hard drive, and OpenOffice starts quickly and runs well on it. OOo is a lot more compatible and full-featured than Abiword. Why would I bother using Abiword on that computer (or any other desktop/laptop/netbook)?

So the only market niche left for Abiword is small, low-powered linux devices like the tablets. Yet they've completely neglected the tablets. Nobody's really touched the long list of showstopper bugs filed years ago against the maemo version of Abiword... Except Yerga, and he moved on to other projects. It makes me wonder exactly what have they been working on? Whatever it is, they're wasting their time. With the next generation of mobile devices able to run OpenOffice well, I figure at this point the Abiword team has fumbled the ball and the project is doomed to just fade away.