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AbiWord: Origin, Philosophy

AbiWord is a powerful, free and cross platform word processing program similar to Microsoft Word. It is suitable for almost all word processing tasks.

The Beginning

Like most Open Source projects, AbiWord started as a cathedral, but has become more like a bazaar. AbiWord is part of a larger project known as AbiSource, which was started by the SourceGear Corporation. The goal of the project was the development of a cross-platform, Open Source office suite beginning with AbiWord the project's word processor.

SourceGear released the source code to AbiWord and a developer community quickly formed around the project. SourceGear has since stopped work on the project and now has no involvement in the project at all. We're very grateful for the marvelous code they developed!

The developer community has since then continued and has made huge improvements to increase the quality of AbiWord

What Makes AbiWord Different?

AbiWord is unique among word processors in its drive to become a fully cross-platform word processor. Our source code is carefully written so that AbiWord will run on virtually any operating system with a minimum of time spent on porting. This combined with our support for internationalization (the ability to run AbiWord in many languages) enables AbiWord to provide Word Processing for everybody.