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OpenOffice has its roots in Sun Microsystems' StarOffice suite of programs. Five years ago, Sun turned its proprietary software into an open-source project. Only recently, however, has the competitor to Microsoft's Office attracted serious attention.

Now Google believes it can help OpenOffice--perhaps working to pare down the software's memory requirements or its mammoth 80MB download size, said Chris DiBona, manager for open-source programs at the search company.

"We want to hire a couple of folks to help make OpenOffice better," DiBona said.

Google has shown an affinity for open-source software, which are programs developed in the open and available for free. Many of the company's programmers came of age in the open-source era, so advancing the open-source agenda comes naturally, DiBona said. But the company also has business reasons to justify its open-source embrace.

"We use a fair amount of open-source software at Google. We want to make sure that's a healthy community. And we want to make sure open source preserves competitiveness within the industry," he said.

Earlier in October, Google and Sun announced a partnership to boost several software projects, but released few details. Asked about OpenOffice collaboration, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the time only that the search engine power would "work to make the distribution of (OpenOffice) more broad." But OpenOffice, like the other software projects the partners intend to work on, competes directly with Microsoft software--a point that has not gone unnoticed.

Full story: ZDNet.com

Japan is drawing up guidelines for its ministries recommending open source software such as Linux as an "important option" in government procurement, an official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said

"This is not intended to exclude a particular software nor to recommend a particular one but it reflects the recent development of open source software as reliable systems," the official said.

"Currently our procurement of software is dominated by commercial software," the majority of which is Windows, the official added.

Linux was created by Linus Torvalds who made the software freely available to the public and later gained the support of major companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Although Windows is used on about 90 per cent of the world's personal computers, some governments as well as large organisations have switched to Linux or have threatened to do so to get discounts from Microsoft.

The Nihon Keizai Shimbun business daily reported that Japan saw the use of Linux as a way of lowering procurement costs and bolstering its defences against cyber-attacks.

Separately, Japan, China and South Korea agreed earlier this year to jointly develop a new computer operating system based on Linux as an alternative to the dominant Windows, the official said.

"Apart from the procurement issue, this project is intended to develop an operating system that supports languages that have Chinese characters," the official said.



Source: Sydney Morning Herald

But a leading freeware advocate said Tuesday it remains to be seen whether President Alejandro Toledo will sign the bill into law.

"There are many associations on a national level that do not agree with this because they believe it will affect their interests," Jose Cairo Gallardo, president of the Peruvian Free Software Association, said.

In a move that went largely unnoticed, Congress voted 61-0 last Thursday to approve the legislation, which would mandate "neutrality" to guarantee public institutions a choice between proprietary software, like Microsoft's, and open-source software, which some users consider more stable, adaptable, cheaper, and less susceptible to viruses and hacker attacks.

The new law would also prohibit any public institution from purchasing computer hardware that utilizes only one software platform or "in any manner limits information autonomy."

There is no prohibition on public institutions regarding the use of open-source software, but open-source software developers are still at a great disadvantage to large companies, like Microsoft, said Cairo Gallardo.

"This would level the playing field," he said. "It would not only be about the sale of software licenses. The one that offers better service obviously would have the better expectation of winning" a public bid, he said. "This would break the monopoly."

The legislation would mandate government institutions evaluating bids from software vendors to compare the use of proprietary software - in which the source code is mostly secret and licensing fees are charged for upgrades - to open-source software, in which the underlying code is available to anyone wanting to study, change and improve its design and then make those suggestions available on the Internet.

Toledo has 25 working days to sign the new bill into law or send it back to Congress with "observations" to modify it, which would set back its passage and possibly kill the initiative.

A call to the government palace seeking the president's position on the issue went unanswered. Microsoft did not immediately comment.

The bill's sponsor, Peruvian Congressman Edgar Villanueva, had pushed three years ago for a law to oblige all public institutions to convert exclusively to open-source software.

Microsoft and several Peruvian software companies lobbied hard against the measure, which garnered little support from lawmakers.

In July 2002, Toledo clearly sided with the software companies, appearing with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to announce the donation of $550,000 (euro458,142) in funds, software and consulting services to the Peruvian government for educational and "e-government" initiatives.

Several countries, including Brazil, China, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea have been actively moving toward open-source alternatives, like the Linux operating system.

Massachusetts government officials on Thursday unveiled plans to phase out Microsoft Office in favor of office productivity suites that support an open-document format from the OASIS standards body, according to a statement from the commonwealth.

Massachusetts will support the newly ratified Open Document Format for Office Applications, or OpenDocument, as the standard for its office documents, according to the statement posted on the governmental Web site by Peter Quinn, chief information officer for Massachusetts. Developed within Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), OpenDocument is an XML (Extensible Markup Language)-based file format that covers the features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents.

Full Story at www.pcworld.com

The competition is back and, this time, it's free!

The latest version of the free OpenOffice suite promises to be a strong competitor to Microsoft Office. It's still in the "beta," or unfinished, stage, but it's already a good alternative for people who aren't heavy users. And you can't argue with the price.

OpenOffice is the fruit of a collaboration between Sun Microsystems and volunteer programmers around the world. Sun bought a German company in 1999 to get office software to bundle with its computers but figured that it wasn't going to make big bucks selling the software to a wider market because of Microsoft's grip. So it released portions of the code to the public. It probably didn't hurt that archrival Microsoft loathes the idea of free software.

Roberto del Puerto, director of the state office of information technology, told the daily that Cuba already had about 1500 computers using the Linux system, a free operating system whose technical data is open for public viewing.

Del Puerto said his office was working on a legal framework that would allow the replacement of the Windows system.

Although Windows is used on about 90 per cent of the world's personal computers, some governments and large organisations have switched to Linux or have threatened to do so to get discounts.

[source: www.smh.com.au]

"Firefox is already used by about 10 percent of IBM's staff, or about 30,000 people. Starting Friday, IBM workers can download the browser from internal servers and get support from the company's help desk staff."

Good to see as far as i am concerened. The sooner M$ is forced to secure and standardise IE the easier my job becomes. This ultimatly results in a higher quality and cheaper product for the client and a better experience for the end user.