OpenOffice.org Is Four Today

People: 
Today is our birthday. Below, is our press release.  
Tell someone.

-Louis Suarez-Potts
Community Manager

=============


13 October 2004

"OpenOffice.org is the most important open-source project in the world."
These words, spoken by founder of GNOME and Novell Ximian CTO, Miguel de
Icaza, on the occasion of the first anniversary of OpenOffice.org, are
more true now than ever before. Today, four years after Sun Microsystems
released the source code of its popular StarOffice to the open-source
community, OpenOffice.org is widely seen as the future of open-source
development and the key to its future.

As an international and multilingual project, OpenOffice.org gives
everyone the freedom to participate in, learn about, and contribute to
the project. And as a product, OpenOffice.org runs natively on Windows,
Linux or Solaris, as well as every other major platform, and is
available in over 44 supported languages. Usable by all, it is the
invaluable tool in the modern office.

Tens of millions use the application daily; millions visit the project
website monthly; thousands contribute to the project. There have been at
least 31 million downloads since the project began-and that is not
counting the millions registered by Red Hat, SuSE, or Mandrake Linux,
which include OpenOffice.org in their distributions.

In the last year, city governments, such as that of Munich, Germany, to
name but one of many, and federal administration offices, such as the
French Ministère de l'Economie, des Finances et de l'Industrie (MINEFI),
chose OpenOffice.org for its technology, flexibility, and future, not
because it is free (gratis). Is the ministry happy with their decision?
Representatives gave a keynote at the recent OOoCon, where they
advocated OpenOffice.org and looked to a future with open-source
software.

And what is that future? An application that bridges not just the
closed- and open-source world but that also bridges the digital divide
from Amsterdam to Zanzibar. An application that uses an internationally
standardized file format and an open production process to give users
perpetual right over their property.

The file format, an XML based implementation, is the open standard
recently approved by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured
Information Standards (OASIS). By using the format, vendor lock in is
impossible. People will choose OpenOffice.org or its commercial
derivations, such as StarOffice, on the basis of value, not because they
have no choice.

That value is extensive, and it is set to grow. This spring,
OpenOffice.org 2.0 will leap over every other office suite. For those
users clamoring for an Access equivalent, it will have it. It will be
more interoperable. And for those developers wanting more modularity
and more responsiveness, 2.0 has that, too.

This coming year will be remarkable, and our door is open.

For a complete archive of birthday pages, see
http://www.openoffice.org/about_us/birthday4.html

Team OpenOffice.org 


==============

About OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is both a open-source project and product. It is free. As
one of the leading open-source projects, OpenOffice.org combines the
worldwide efforts of developers and endusers to produce a complete
office productivity suite that runs on all major platforms and in over
30 supported languages while being compatible with Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice.org is sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Inc., and hosted by
CollabNet.


Contact Details

Jacqueline McNally (UTC +08h00)
Marketing Project Lead
jacqueline@openoffice.org
+61 (8)9474 3021

John McCreesh (UTC +01h00)
Marketing Project Co-Lead
jpmcc@openoffice.org
+44 (0)131 523 9218

Louis Suárez-Potts
Community Manager
louis@openoffice.org


© 2004 OpenOffice.org


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: announce-unsubscribe@openoffice.org
For additional commands, e-mail: announce-help@openoffice.org