OpenOffice, the leading open-source office suite, is available in 31 languages, including Slovenian, Basque and Galician, and Indian languages such as Gujarati, Devanagari, Kannada and Malayalam.
In 1999 Sun acquired the StarOffice software suite, a competitor of Microsoft's Office suite (primarily Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), and distributed it for free under the name OpenOffice.
For years, Sun has paid its own engineers to improve OpenOffice and has helped support the broader efforts of the open-source developers who build the software.
It is Apache OpenOffice; it is no longer OpenOffice.org, though that remains its Web site.
Windows 7 users will need to buy Microsoft Office, or you can also download OpenOffice and Gimp.
In response, the plan was to migrate to OpenOffice and Debian Linux.
If you don't like the price of the product, don't buy it; there are plenty of usable free alternatives out there (if you want a desktop publishing-style program like Pages for the Mac, there's the Scribus project; for spreadsheets and presentations, there's OpenOffice 3.0, now available in Aqua-style goodness).
The only problem with this is that it's not true - certainly not in one of the flagship projects of open source, OpenOffice.
Your OpenOffice article (If this suite's a success..., December 8) erred in saying I "formalised the concept of open source".
OpenOffice is the only free and open source product competitive with Office, able to read and write Microsoft format documents almost flawlessly.
