Oracle has just announced that they intend to move OpenOffice.org to a purely community based open source project and no longer offer a commercial version.
“Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis,” said Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect. ”We intend to begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office. Oracle will continue to strongly support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF).”
Oracle has been a very closed company for some time, but they have also invested heavily in Linux and MySQL. It will be interesting to see if the community really jumps onto the OpenOffice bandwagon.
OpenOffice 3, released in 2008, reached a new milestone this week with the release of the 3.3 beta build. This new compilation does not offer much new functionalities, but does include several fixes.
We’ve also announced in November of 2009, that OpenOffice 3 reached 1 million downloads, making it the most popular OpenOffice suite so far. The 3.3 build just added a few more small features:
- Improvements in the dictionary and translations.
- Possibility to add different colors in sheets.
- Stability improvements and several bugs fixed.
This build is available to download for Windows, Mac, Solaris and Linux (of course); in Linux versions we can use the 32bit and 64bits. All builds available here.
The open source community maintains a simple way to do things, never stop collaborating. Even though the work it is not always great, they keep offering possibilities; which in this world is a vital thing to have.
Gaming, especially with MMOs of fast paced shooters is difficult with the PC because of the limitations of the keyboard. Obviously one could go for a better mouse with more buttons – openoffice.org though so too.
They have just released a new mouse with 18 buttons including a thumb controlled joystick. It’s fully compatible with games such as WoW and browsers such as Firefox. And yes, obviously it works with the original Open Office software.
From looking at the picture you can probably tell it’s not the most attractive piece of software. I don’t quite get why they chose those colours and the material looks cheap and very 90s-ish. But hey, I’m sure gamers and power users the world over will love this thing.
For over several years now, the OpenOffice.org Project has been increasing significantly. And on October 28th they’ve reached the 100 million download with their 3.0 version.
Open Office 3, released a year ago, included several improvements:
- Enhanced compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007
- Added edition capabilities for PDF
- Included Open Office extensions (quite similar like you have in Firefox add-ons)
- Various improvements with Writer (Word), Calc (Excel) and Impress (PowerPoint).
The latest and stable build is the 3.1.1 but there is already a Beta available for the 3.2 version, you can check it here.
Open Office originally appeared as StarOffice, owned by Sun Microsystems (back in the year 2000). The first original version of Open Office, 1.0 obviously, showed up in 2002. And for those that worked with it, knew that it had a lot to improve.
Even though all that, this project was the only one that maintains certain stability over the years with an “attempt” to use it as a free possibility working with Office standards. Personally I’ve never got used to it to use it, but continue to be as the main possibility for several governmental and educational entities, related to costs of course.
