[ooo-announce] Ten Years: OpenOffice.org

All, a belated happy birthday!

Ten years ago, on 13 October 2000, Sun released the source code to StarOffice under open-source
licenses. Formidable in size and complexity and positioned against a seemingly overwhelmingly
dominant competitor, OpenOffice.org was seen as at best, foolish, at worse, boring, fit only for
office drones. Browsers, it was said, have more fun.

But we, the OpenOffice.org project community, showed these skeptics to be wrong. We showed the
world that a free office productivity suite using open standards, especially what later came to be
known as the OpenDocument Format (ODF), is more desirable, more powerful, and more transformative
than any browser could be. We, the OpenOffice.org project community, gave the world a set of tools
that allows all to participate as equals in the fields of commerce, science, education, government,
to name but a few.

We have given the world the tools to do things and to work together. With OpenOffice.org, people
produce - and their productions are theirs to keep and do with as they will. That is real freedom.

It is a freedom that today perhaps 100 million people enjoy. In some regions, our product's usage
is greater than 20 percent of the office suite userbase. How have we done this? And without
spending the expected billions on advertising and other marketing efforts? To a great extent,
OpenOffice.org, the application made by us, the community, sells itself, and its good news is
spread through word of mouth, not via billboards and the like. Its professional quality and
performance is tremendously persuasive. OpenOffice.org works on all platforms and in over a hundred
languages, and perhaps most important, it also works well with other suites: our code and our use
of the ODF means there is no vendor lock-in. Users, from those in government offices to individuals
at home, are free to choose what is best for them without the anxiety they'll be stuck with
something they do not much like but costs a lot.

They have chosen OpenOffice.org, and we are sure they will continue to do so in even greater
numbers over the next ten years. They choose it today it not simply because it costs them nothing
to download from our site, but because of its professional quality and flexibility - as well as its
reassuring consistency. Over the last ten years, we have regularly released small and large
versions incorporating new features, functionality, and design, all tested and qualified for any
user environment. This fall, we are releasing OpenOffice.org 3.3, and the beta is available for
community testing. Expect more releases-and also a lot more extensions.

With extensions, there is virtually no limit to what the application can do, and every day the
community makes more available under a variety of licenses. These address individual, as well as
enterprise, needs. Support, services, and training, offered by Oracle and other large and small
companies, is globally available in a host of languages; these all complement the free community
support and constitute a portion of the large and growing OpenOffice.org ecosystem.

And our momentum is building, as the size and complexity of the community contributing to the
project grows and as more see in OpenOffice.org a future they want to be part of. It's a future of
freedom that we commit to, as a community that includes Oracle as well other enterprises, and
countless thousands of independent contributors.

Our first ten years have proven the strength of our vision and technology against every imaginable
challenge; the next - well, who can say? Only this: we commit to making the tools of productivity,
growing the community, and improving the product - open to all to inspect, use, improve, distribute,
and we invite the world to join us in our commitment.

Happy Birthday, OpenOffice.org!

On behalf of the OpenOffice.org Project,

Louis Suarez-Potts
Community Development Manager
OpenOffice.org


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