Open Office turns seven
My birthday wish: the continued humbling of MS.
OpenOffice.org community celebrates its 7th anniversary
104 million downloads of the open source productivity suiteToday, the open source project OpenOffice.org celebrates its 7th birthday. Founded by Sun Microsystems on October 13th, 2000, continues to experience tremendous growth. The project recently counted 104 million downloads from its website, and downloads have been increasing since the release of OpenOffice.org 2.3 last month. It is widely considered the most important open source productivity suite and one of the largest open source projects.
OpenOffice.org is available in more than 80 languages and runs natively on every major platform; it uses the ISO standard, the OpenDocument Format, for its files. Thousands from around the world contribute to its ongoing success, helping with the development, localisation, documentation, user support and marketing of the program. “OpenOffice.org is being developed around the world, and it is being used around the world by governments, businesses and individuals”, said Florian Effenberger, Marketing Project Co-Lead of OpenOffice.org. “The community has achieved what few predicted seven years ago, and we have just begun!”
In addition to its founder and main contributor Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org is also recognizes the contributions of RedFlag Software, IBM, Red Hat, and Novell, among others. OpenOffice.org welcomes the contributions of all organizations and individuals.
OpenOffice.org 2.3 can be found at http://download.openoffice.org/2.3.0/
Links to community and professional support, templates, books, etc., can be obtained from http://support.openoffice.org
If your computer comes with a fully functional MS Suite, fine. Otherwise DO NOT BUY MICROSOFT OFFICE; unless you have some rare, specialized need, it is a waste of your money. Open Office is a free (as are several other Office alternatives) and its Writer program does pretty much everything MS-Word does, and few things it doesn’t (PDF creation).
Plus it has a thriving, mostly volunteer support community, which is a lot more useful and responsive than Microsoft’s to those who aren’t able or willing to fork over a few hundred dollars every couple of years.
Another MS-Office alternative that I haven’t used personally, but that “geeks for peace” I know use and recommend is KOffice.
