The OpenOffice.org community has finally unleashed the long-awaited initial release of OpenOffice.org 1.0, a full-featured, free Microsoft Office alternative. OpenOffice.org, the largest open-source project ever completed, contains 7.5 million lines of code--the result of more than 18 months of collaborative effort by more than 10,000 members of the OpenOffice.org community. OpenOffice.org 1.0 and Sun Microsystems' StarOffice 6.0, which will ship later this month, share the same code base.
"OpenOffice.org 1.0 may be the single best hope for consumers fed-up with Microsoft's desktop monopoly," said Eric Raymond, cofounder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). "With Sun moving to a full service and support business model for StarOffice, users around the globe will continue to have a free office productivity software tool through the OpenOffice.org open source community."
OpenOffice.org runs on Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, and various other UNIX versions and offers four primary desktop applications--word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing. The suite works transparently with popular document file formats, including Microsoft Office formats. Sun initiated the OpenOffice.org community's creation less than 2 years ago, when the company donated the StarOffice source code and opened it up to public improvement and peer review, a process that Sun says has resulted in a stable, secure, and flexible software suite.
For more information and the free download, visit the OpenOffice.org Web site.
