Tuesday, May 14, 2002

Washington Post on OpenOffice -- 4:35 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

OpenOffice is a free, open-source replacement for Microsoft Office (for those who care, it's a fork of StarOffice). Yep, we've heard that one before, haven't we. But the new release (OpenOffice 1.0) seems to be a contender for "best-yet". A few days ago The Washington Post published some very favorable impressions of this software in an article entitled The Office Suite That Lets You See Past Redmond. Quoteworthy:

It's hardly perfect, but somebody in Redmond ought to be worried about this program.

So what? Big deal? Well, this is a very interesting time. Microsoft has set a mid-summer deadline for its new licensing scheme: pay a subscription fee for regular upgrades, need 'em or not, or pay a lot more when you finally do upgrade. A large number of big companies are very unhappy with this coercion and are checking out alternatives.

And in the end the question is: who owns your data? Is it locked up in a proprietary Microsoft file format (Word, Excel, etc) which can change at any time without warning or notice, and which can only be read by costly Microsoft software? And if so, doesn't that bother you?

News for 05/14/2002

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