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In an interesting twist (interesting for Microsoft and their OOXML apologists), about a month ago, MAMPU, the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, decided that they were going to go OpenOffice.org and go ODF, and dump Microsoft Office by year-end 2008. This made its round around news sites, and everyone was naturally talking about it.
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.
The Canadian Labour Congress chose to use OpenOffice.org from now on as their suite of business applications. They had two options to replace their old WordPerfect installations: the widely used Microsoft Office or the free OpenOffice.org. The decision they took was clearly a financial one, saving approximately $60,000 in licensing fees.
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
Oracle’s history of not caring too much about Free Software led several contributors to fork OpenOffice.org. And that is a very brief account of how LibreOffice came to be.
The Free Software Foundation announced a project to assemble a replacement extension library for OpenOffice.org, which will list only free software extensions. OpenOffice.org is free software, and an important contribution to the free software community. However, the program offers the user a library of extensions, and some of them are proprietary.
Why don't more people use OpenOffice, the free and open source alternative to Microsoft Office? Microsoft has spent years and dollars engineering creative ways to keep people using its costly software and preventing them from switching to OpenOffice -- that's one explanation, writes Lou Dolinar.
