Originally Published: 2002-05-12

The good news: the offer, in the field of office suites, is expanding, and the Microsoft dominant position is being threatened by several free and compatible packages. After a lengthy wait, one of the best alternatives to proprietary formats, OpenOffice.org, is finally reaching maturity. Some weeks ago, in fact, the OpenOffice.org community released version 1.0 of the well-known open source suite.
The release of OpenOffice.org 1.0 is the result of 18 months of joint development by members of the OpenOffice.org community, which includes developers from Sun Microsystem, independent programmers and end users who devoted their time for free in favour of the software package.
OpenOffice.org shares the same core of source code of Sun's StarOffice 6.0, but it does not include any support and any third-party application whose code cannot be released under an open source licence.
"OpenOffice.org" reads a communiqué "offers freedom of software choice both to consumers and to companies, thus laying the bases for a free market of support and services, while the Sun brand product, StarOffice 6.0, gives for-fee full support to privates and companies alike".
"OpenOffice.org 1.0 could be the consumers' best hope to stop the Microsoft monopoly in the Desktop market," declared Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). "While Sun is moving towards a fee-based model for the version branded StarOffice, users all over the world will continue to have a free alternative to the traditional company productivity software packages, thanks to the OpenOffice.org community."
The suite, available in 25 languages for Windows, Linux and Solaris platforms, offers an entire set of features and tools, including a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation maker, a program for vector drawing and an HTML editor. The open nature of Sun's project also allows different versions of the software to be designed for different computers. Programmers are working on versions of OpenOffice for other operating systems, including Apple's Mac OS X, SGI's Irix, and the FreeBSD version of Unix.

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