I’ve been spending a lot of time with OpenOffice.org lately. I’ve been running OOo, as it is often abbreviated, for many years now (I used StarOffice before OpenOffice.org was created.) I have used it everyday, to do everything (all of my spreadsheets, worksheets, articles, presentations, I used it to write a novel, I used it in seminary for papers, etc., etc.,) for at least 4 years. I’ve not owned MS Office in a very long time.
Lately, I’ve been running the 2.3 Release Candidate to help with QA, which has been fun (and 2.3 looks mighty good – especially with the improvements to Base.) I wrote an article on OpenOffice.org for LASA’s knowledgebase, and I wrote another one on Base specifically (Base is the database component to OOo, new in 2.0, and pretty good, and improving fast.) that will be published in Linux Identity Magazine. I hope to start doing OpenOffice.org training soon.
I happen to think that unless an organization has deeply invested in developing custom Access databases, there aren’t too many reasons left not to switch to OpenOffice.org. Actually, even if they have, for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, it’s really great. It’s stable, feature rich, uses open standards, reads and writes MS files, and, did I mention it’s free? No administration fees, no license checking, no running out of licenses for larger organizations, nothin’. Download it and put it on every desktop and get rid of that license manager thingy. In talking with organizations that are using it – adoption issues for staff seem to be fairly minimal (my partner, a non-techie writer, uses it everyday, with no complaints.) Of course, like all open source software, it is “free as in kittens” – but this particular kitten is pretty grown up, and already spayed and litter trained.
So, here’s the great news: Hot on the heels of Microsoft missing the ISO boat, IBM is lending their weight to the OpenOffice.org suite. They are having 35 (!) programmers work on OOo. It’s not only that they are going to be contributing to the project – but remember the old adage “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”? IBM’s reputation is bound to help increase adoption of OpenOffice.org. More adoption means more developers involved, more users helping, more resources available. Outside of the US, OpenOffice.org adoption is growing fast. I imagine that will begin to happen here as well.
(In the spirit of full disclosure: IBM has given grants to NOSI in 2003 and 2007 for the NOSI Open Source Primer.)
{ 0 comments… add one now }