OpenOffice.org Is 4 Today

craigaa writes "OpenOffice.org turns four years old today. A press release on the announce list giving an overview of the project has been issued with a link to the birthday page. What have your experiences been with OpenOffice.org over the past four years? Has the project and software met your expectations? What are you expecting in the years to come?" An interview at NewsForge (also part of OSTG) poses the same kind of questions (and others) to Louis Suarez-Potts, the project's Community Manager. Suarez-Potts notes some specific ways to help the OO.org effort (especially if you are a Cocoa expert to help with the move to Aqua), and talks about the recent Sun-Microsoft agreement.

Comments

Re:OOo Four already!

[AKAImBatman]

FWIW, StarOffice has been in development since 1986. That makes OpenOffice more like 18 years old. Only the name and the Open Source project "OpenOffice" have been around for four years.

Singapore Def. Ministry uses OpenOffice on 5k PCs

[mandreiana]

One of the birthday gifts: The Defence Ministry of Singapore installs Open-Office in 5,000 new computers as an alternative to proprietary software

Re:OO.o saved my client's behind

[micromoog]

It's an Excel problem, exacerbated by bad user habits. Anyway, Excel couldn't fix the problem, and OOo could, which was the point of the anecdote.

My own contribution: the other day, one of our account managers desparately needed to send a PDF to a client ASAP. While they were pondering the quickest way to buy a copy of Acrobat, I fired up OOo and solved their problem completely in 5 minutes.

Re:My experience

[0123456]

"Most people create documents for others to view, and in today's corporate environment, that means .doc format."

Maybe my employer is strange, but most documents I get to view in my corporate environment are .PDFs...