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Michael Brauer, the OpenOffice.org XML project lead and OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee Chair, has written a blog entry about the progress of native Office Open XML (OOXML) import filter development for OpenOffice.org. Brauer explains the importance of supporting OOXML in OpenOffice.org and also describes some of the challenges associated with supporting an emerging document format.
Although OpenOffice.org is an open source project with its own community, the core team that does the bulk of the actual coding and quality assurance is based in Hamburg, Germany. Recently, I had a chance to visit the developers behind this key open source project.
Jim Parkinson of Sun has been listening to critiques of OpenOffice's governance policies and responds with a post that suggests that Sun plans to address the problems.
"OpenOffice.org is one of the most popular products of the FOSS (Free/Open Source) community, and for many millions of people it is their first experience of FOSS. Key to OpenOffice.org's success has been its ability to compete openly and freely with competitors on any platform, and demonstrate that FOSS is a better choice..."
The Ubuntu team has decided that instead of OpenOffice.org 3.0, released last week, the default version of the office suite in the Ubuntu 8.10 release will be OpenOffice.org 2.4.1.
Apparently, the only thing that stopped developers from creating useful OpenOffice.org extensions was the lack of a place to publish them. With the launch of the OpenOffice.org Extension Repository, the number of extensions listed there has shot up, and there are no signs of a slowdown. Although quantity doesn't always mean quality, the repository already offers a few nifty extensions that can expand the functionality of OpenOffice.org and make your work more efficient.
OpenOffice.org is a flagship for free and open source software and a success by most measurements, but there have long been murmurings of discontent among developers. In this feature Richard Hillesley discusses the issues with Michael Meeks who works as an OpenOffice.org developer at Novell
