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OpenOffice.org is a free office suite of applications available for many different operating systems including Linux, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X. It supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange.

OpenOffice.org is based on StarOffice, an office suite developed by StarDivision and acquired by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The source code of the suite was released in July 2000 with the aim of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free, open and high-quality alternative. OpenOffice.org is free software, available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

The project and software are informally referred to as "OpenOffice", but project organizers report that this term is a trademark held by another party, requiring them to adopt "OpenOffice.org" as its formal name, and abbreviated as OOo or OO.o.

Overview


According to its mission statement, the OpenOffice.org project aims "To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format."

OpenOffice.org aims to compete with Microsoft Office and emulate its look and feel where suitable. It can read and write most of the file formats found in Microsoft Office, and many other applications; an essential feature of the suite for many users. OpenOffice.org has been found to be able to open files of older versions of Microsoft Office and damaged files that newer versions of Microsoft Office itself cannot open. However, it cannot open older Word for Macintosh (MCW) files.

The primary development platforms are Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris. There are also ports available or in progress for Mac OS X, OS/2 and many Unix-like operating systems such as FreeBSD.

Federal Computer Week issue listed OpenOffice.org as one of the "5 stars of open-source products." In contrast, OpenOffice.org was used by The Guardian newspaper to illustrate what it claims are the limitations of open-source software.

OpenOffice.org is a collection of different applications that work together closely to provide the features expected from a modern office suite. Many of the components are designed to mirror those available in Microsoft Office. The components available include:

* Writer - a word processor similar in look and feel to Microsoft Word and offering a comparable range of functions and tools. It also includes the ability to export Portable Document Format (PDF) files with no additional software, and can also function as a WYSIWYG editor for creating and editing web pages. One important difference between Writer and Microsoft Word is that in Writer, many functions and number formats from Calc (below) are available in Writer's tables.

* Calc - a spreadsheet similar to Microsoft Excel with a roughly equivalent range of features. Calc provides a number of features not present in Excel, including a system which automatically defines series for graphing, based on the layout of the user's data. Calc is also capable of writing spreadsheets directly as a PDF file.

* Impress - a presentation program similar to Microsoft PowerPoint. It can export presentations to Adobe Flash (SWF) files allowing them to be played on any computer with the Flash player installed. It also includes the ability to create PDF files. Impress suffers from a lack of ready-made presentation designs. However, templates are readily available on the Internet.

OpenOffice.org Basic is available in the Writer and Calc applications.

History


Originally developed as the proprietary software application suite StarOffice by the German company StarDivision, the code was purchased in 1999 by Sun Microsystems. In August 1999 version 5.2 of StarOffice was made available free of charge.

On July 19 2000, Sun Microsystems announced that it was making the source code of StarOffice available for download under both the LGPL and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) with the intention of building an open source development community around the software. The new project was known as OpenOffice.org, and its website went live on October 13 2000.

Work on version 2.0 began in early 2003 with the following goals: better interoperability with Microsoft Office; better performance, with improved speed and lower memory usage; greater scripting capabilities; better integration, particularly with GNOME; an easier-to-find and use database front-end for creating reports, forms and queries; a new built-in SQL database; and improved usability. A beta version was released on March 4 2005.

On September 2 2005 Sun announced that it was retiring the SISSL. As a consequence, the OpenOffice.org Community Council announced that it would no longer dual license the office suite, and future versions would use only the LGPL.

On October 20 2005, OpenOffice.org 2.0 was formally released to the public. and KDE.

OpenOffice.org can also be used on Mac OS X. A version using the Aqua interface was planned for OpenOffice.org version 2, but due to technical challenges, licensing complications and limited development resources, the project was postponed to the OpenOffice.org 3.0 release. The application has been made available in two intermediate varieties that run on OS X in the meantime:

* OpenOffice.org Mac OS X (X11). This version requires the installation of X11.app or XDarwin, and is a close port of the well-tested Unix version. This version is functionally equivalent to the Unix version, but its user interface has a significantly different look and feel to that of purpose-designed Mac OS X applications; the application uses it own menu bar instead of the usual Mac OS menu attached to the top of the screen, for example. Version 2.0.4 provides the X11 port with the ability to conveniently use installed system fonts like other Mac OS X applications, the use of cups for printing.

Current development of the Aqua version of OpenOffice.org : [http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Category:Aqua Native OpenOffice.org (without X11) ]

Last screenshots, and infos about OpenOffice.org port, without X11: [http://eric.bachard.free.fr/news/ ericb's blog]

* NeoOffice. A fork version integrates with OS X by using Java, Carbon and (increasingly) Cocoa. NeoOffice adheres fairly closely to OS X GUI standards (for example, using native pull-down menus), and has full access to OS X's font and printing subsystems. Its releases lag slightly behind the official OpenOffice.org releases, due to a small team.

Other projects



Other projects run alongside the main OpenOffice.org project and are easier to contribute to. These include documentation, internationalization and localization and the API.

OpenGroupware.org is a set of extension programs to allow the sharing of OpenOffice.org documents, calendars, address books, e-mails, instant messaging and blackboards, and provide access to other groupware applications.

There is also an effort to create and share assorted document templates and other useful additions at OOExtras. These libraries do not use the OpenOffice.org API. They directly read or write the OpenOffice.org files using Perl standard file compression/uncompression, XML access and UTF-8 encoding modules.

A distribution of OpenOffice.org called "Portable OpenOffice.org" is designed to run the suite from a USB flash drive. Kaspersky Lab has shown a proof of concept virus for OpenOffice.org. This shows OOo viruses are possible, but there is no known virus "in the wild".

In a private meeting of the French Ministry of Defense, additional macro-related security issues were raised. OpenOffice.org developers have responded by noting there has been no published vulnerability, but have been in talks with the researcher to fix the vulnerability.

Reactions


Market share


Although Microsoft Office retains 95% of the general market, OpenOffice.org and StarOffice have secured 14% of the large enterprise market as of 2004.

Java controversy


Version 1 depended on a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) being present on the user's computer for some auxiliary functions, but version 2 increased the suite's use of the programming platform. The following areas of OpenOffice.org 2.0 depend on a JRE being present:

* The media player on Unix-like systems
* All document wizards in Writer
* Accessibility tools
* Report Autopilot
* JDBC driver support
* HSQL database engine, which is used in OpenOffice.org base
* XSLT filters
* BeanShell, the NetBeans scripting language and the Java UNO bridge
* Export filters to the Aportis.doc (.pdb) format for the Palm OS or Pocket Word (.psw) format for the Pocket PC
* Export filter to LaTeX

The dependency on an installed JRE had drawn criticism from advocates of free software, as the JRE generally available for desktop platforms was, at the time, a proprietary application bundle, thus undercutting the principles of freedom advocated by such groups. The fact that Sun Microsystems is both the creator of Java and the chief supporter of OpenOffice.org has drawn accusations of ulterior motives for this technology choice.

The issue of OpenOffice.org's use of Java came to the fore in May 2005, when Richard Stallman appeared to call for a fork of the application in a posting on the Free Software Foundation website. (http://software.newsforge.com/software/05/05/16/1358227.shtml) This led to discussions within the OpenOffice.org community and between Sun staff and developers involved in GNU Classpath, a free replacement for Sun's Java implementation, in which it was determined that all necessary steps were in place to ensure that key OpenOffice.org uses of the Java platform would be supported in GCJ and Classpath.

Fedora Core 4 (released on June 13 2005) included a beta version of OpenOffice.org version 2, running on GCJ and GNU Classpath. This demonstrated that the use of Java did not need to be a barrier to the use of OpenOffice.org on free software platforms. When 2.0 stable was released, the same continued. The OpenOffice.org developers also placed into their development guidelines various requirements to ensure that future versions of OpenOffice.org could be run on free implementations of Java.

Sun Microsystems announced in May 2006 that it intended to release the Java platform under an open-source license. (http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2006-05/sunflash.20060516.3.xml) On November 13 2006, Sun released javac, JavaHelp, and the Java HotSpot virtual machine as Free/Open Source software, under the GNU General Public License. They reiterated that they intend to do the same for most of the rest of the Java implementations.

A common point of confusion is that mail merge to generate emails requires the Java API JavaMail in StarOffice; however, as of version 2.0.1, OpenOffice.org uses a Python-component instead.

Trivia


OpenOffice.org includes several Easter eggs, including some quite fully fledged games: a version of Space Invaders is playable by entering a cheat code into a cell in Calc, as is a version of Tic-tac-toe, and the names and picture of the OpenOffice.org Calc developer team. (To play this game, type =game() press Enter, cell should now read "say what?"
Type =game("StarWars") press Enter again.)
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