AboutWelcome to Free Software Daily (FSD). FSD is a hub for news and articles by and for the free and open source community. FSD is a community driven site where members of the community submit and vote for the stories that they think are important and interesting to them. Click the "About" link to read more...
Last month, just one week after IBM announced it would help with OpenOffice.org's development, the company released Lotus Symphony, an office suite based on OpenOffice.org code. I found a lot of slick features in Lotus Symphony, but I worry that Symphony could affect the OpenOffice.org community adversely.
At the beginning of the year I wrote about IBM Lotus Symphony Beta 3, IBM's closed source OpenOffice-based free office suite. Now the final release, Lotus Symphony 1 is out. I wasn't impressed last time, but I installed the final release on Ubuntu 8.04 to test it out.
Is IBM gearing up to disrupt Microsoft Office? Apparently so. In fact, Big Blue is bringing Lotus Symphony 1.2 — an open source application suite — to the Mac.
A potpourri of news from the past week or so, starting with success stories and proceeding to releases of new software that supports OpenDocument Format (ODF)
IBM Tuesday released the second beta of its free Lotus Symphony productivity applications suite and says a final version will ship next year designed to drive adoption of open file formats.
The strengths of IBM Lotus Symphony are also its weaknesses. Based on the OpenOffice.org source code, on the one hand, the beta of this newly released office application offers a much needed revision of the interface. On the other hand, too much of this revision takes the form of leaving out features, and the changes are accompanied by high hardware demands.
IBM and Novell have announced an integrated open collaboration client for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop that includes IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM productivity tools to deliver advanced email and calendar capabilities, unified communication & collaboration and lightweight yet powerful word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation capabilities with OpenDocument Format support.
I’ve been so busy with other stuff that I’ve only peripherally been paying attention to an ongoing meme on the Internet about how the World Wide Web Consortium’s Common Document Format (CDF) had been identified by the OpenDocument Foundation as a superior document format to the OpenDocument Format that it had been backing for so long.
