A free alternative to Microsoft

The New OpenOffice.org 1.0 has finally been released to public

The good news: the offer, in the field of office suites, is expanding, and the Microsoft dominant position is being threatened by several free and compatible packages. After a lengthy wait, one of the best alternatives to proprietary formats, OpenOffice.org, is finally reaching maturity. Some weeks ago, in fact, the OpenOffice.org community released version 1.0 of the well-known open source suite.
The release of OpenOffice.org 1.0 is the result of 18 months of joint development by members of the OpenOffice.org community, which includes developers from Sun Microsystem, independent programmers and end users who devoted their time for free in favour of the software package.
OpenOffice.org shares the same core of source code of Sun's StarOffice 6.0, but it does not include any support and any third-party application whose code cannot be released under an open source licence.
"OpenOffice.org" reads a communiqué "offers freedom of software choice both to consumers and to companies, thus laying the bases for a free market of support and services, while the Sun brand product, StarOffice 6.0, gives for-fee full support to privates and companies alike".
"OpenOffice.org 1.0 could be the consumers' best hope to stop the Microsoft monopoly in the Desktop market," declared Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). "While Sun is moving towards a fee-based model for the version branded StarOffice, users all over the world will continue to have a free alternative to the traditional company productivity software packages, thanks to the OpenOffice.org community."
The suite, available in 25 languages for Windows, Linux and Solaris platforms, offers an entire set of features and tools, including a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation maker, a program for vector drawing and an HTML editor. The open nature of Sun's project also allows different versions of the software to be designed for different computers. Programmers are working on versions of OpenOffice for other operating systems, including Apple's Mac OS X, SGI's Irix, and the FreeBSD version of Unix.
The advantages of OpenOffice.org include its compatibility with the main formats of Microsoft's Office XP (especially doc and xls) and with all the formats used by StarOffice 6.0: this way, users are not forced to give up the comfort of being able to read, save and exchange documents with users still working with Microsoft's ubiquitous suite.
The OpenOffice.org project is made of over 7.5 million lines of code, and to date the development versions of this suite were downloaded 4.5 million times.
When the announcement of the release of version 1.0 came out, the site of OpenOffice.org was literally stormed by eager users, who caused intermittent failures and long waits for page loading.
Openoffice.org is based on open APIs and on the XML data interchange format. Additional porting, such as FreeBSD, IRIX and Mac OS X, are in various stages of completion, thanks to developers and end users in the community.
The package can be freely downloaded from www.openoffice.org or received onto a CD against payment of shipping costs.

Publication Date: 2002-05-12
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=1305