linuxurious's Journal: Openoffice.org - Introduction

Copyright (c) 2002 William Ku
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Part 1 of 3

Introduction
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You may have heard of Sun Microsystems(R) Staroffice(R) which is being
offered as a viable and cheaper alternative to Microsoft(R) Office(R).
Openoffice.org is the open source (or free) cousin of Staroffice(R).
Staroffice(R) used to be free as in you can freely download and install
in as many computers as you like but Sun Microsystems(R) has recently
decided to charge for Staroffice(R). However, pleased do not fret as
Openoffice.org will always be free and we are going to show you in this
article how and why Openoffice.org instead of MS Office(R) and
Staroffice(R) is for you.

Openoffice.org was started as a community project whereby the source
code of certain parts of Staroffice(R) were released to the public for
volunteers to work on and improve upon them. While these improvements
will always be made freely available to the public, Sun Microsystems(R)
reserves the right to incorporate the improvements to StarOffice(R)
which is still a closed-source project. For those of you who are
familiar with the Netscape/Mozilla story, it is the same model that
Sun Microsystems(R) is using. You might be wondering that if that is
the case, StarOffice will always be the better product. However, this
may not be the case since Openoffice.org is constantly being improved
by expert programmers all around the world who have kindly contributed
their time towards this community cause and improvements are being made
available quickly in the form of frequent software upgrades (could be in
the space of a few weeks) while new versions of Staroffice(R) (and
Microsoft(R) Office are typically only made available between intervals
of several months.

Openoffice.org has since evolved and come of age. Recently, its
milestone Openoffice.org 1.0 Office Suite was released and we are going
to show you how and why Openoffice.org 1.0 will work for you.