IIRC, for "abandoned" you should read "went to work for Apple, who demanded as a condition of employment that he cease work on Sawfish". Rather nasty of them, if true.
Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way
Posted Nov 22, 2011 8:12 UTC (Tue) by Yenya (subscriber, #52846)
[Link]
Interesting, I did not know that.
I had the impression that he declared sawfish has reached the mature state, so it did not need further development at all.
I have even managed to look it up - I think this was the point where the group of developers decided to take over the sawfish development, and make a formal release after long time: