Just over one year after the release of OpenOffice 3.0, OpenOffice.org (OOo) project developer Joost Andrae has announced that the free office suite has been downloaded more than one hundred million times since the launch of version 3.0. OpenOffice is an open source office suite from Sun Microsystems for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems.

OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite. It is a free office suite. A new version OpenOffice 2.3 is officially released today (September 17th, 2007) for Linux fans. OpenOffice 2.3 boasts of some improved features

For the past six years or so, my office productivity suite of choice has been OpenOffice.org. In that time, I've watched the suite progress slowly but steadily toward the goal of being "just as good" as Microsoft Office.

The purchase of StarDivision, the makers of StarOffice, a German office "productivity suite", by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The subsequent release to the free software community of the StarOffice code, in the shape of OpenOffice, came as a surprise to many.

If you just dropped in from outer space, Apache OpenOffice, or what used to be called OpenOffice.org, was a Sun Microsystems-sponsored project. It was at one time, the most popular office suite, as it was pre-installed on almost all Linux and BSD desktop distributions.

Most Linux and Open Source enthusiasts are familiar with the OpenOffice.Org office suite. OpenOffice is great, but sometimes you just need a lighter and faster alternative. Maybe you've got a netbook or an older computer and you don't need a full, integrated, office suite, but just a few of the main applications like a word processor and a spreadsheet program.

IBM calls its new office productivity suite, built upon OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony. This disappoints two groups. The first group, fans like me of OpenOffice, wish it kept the OpenOffice name to help further the open cause. The second group wishes the old Lotus Symphony office suite, an early competitor to Microsoft Office, had climbed out of the grave.

When you think about office suites, two names come to mind: Microsoft Office and OpenOffice. Although the vast majority of Linux users depend upon OpenOffice for their office needs, the alternatives should not be overlooked.

If you run Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, or Mandriva, among other distributions, then whenever you run OpenOffice.org you don't run the "official" version, but rather Go-OO, an office suite based on the OpenOffice.org source code. Go-OO includes enhancements and functions that haven't been accepted by Sun, and that may never be, because of licensing, business, or other reasons.