Sun Microsystems Offers A Free Alternative To MS Office
It is freeware, not shareware, and it comes without any spy-ware, pop-ups, viruses or other such irritants! I am not going to put a long and boring post about this, but will only touch on the surface of it and to bring about an awareness of its existence.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do the math on this one: $400 – $500 for MS Office (standard One PC license issue) vs $0.00 for OpenOffice.org with licensing for unlimited installations… Whoa! This isn’t the first time that Sun Microsystems has developed an office suite that doesn’t cost anything. The original offering was StarOffice. It is still around and works greater than ever. It is very reasonable in price, but can no longer be offered free of charge as it was during development.
Many of the features in StarOffice, however are also available in OpenOffice. A major difference between the two has always been that StarOffice is a total work environment, where OpenOffice is your basic office applications. (Word Processing, Database, Presentation Writer, Spreadsheet, and an additional application for editing scientific formulas) Furthermore, OpenOffice is Open Source and follows the Open Source Initiative guidelines. This means that you not only receive the already compiled applications from Sun, but you have the source code used to compile the applications as well. The initiative also states that you are licensed to install the software on as many PCs as you wish, freely redistribute the software by giving it away, or even sell it if you want to. Now, that is just too cool isn’t it? 
Compatibility… You are not locked down to one operating system. With this free office suite, you may if you want to, but are not restricted to, use Microsoft Windows on the PC running it. OpenOffice.org is multi platform and will execute fine on Microsoft Windows (98 – Vista), Linux, Sun Solaris, Mac X, and Free BSD. You also receive document compatibility between all of your PC’s. (even those PCs you have that run MS Office or WordPerfect). You may even export your document to PDF format for even greater compatibility between platforms and use Adobe reader to access it. I use version 2.3 on both Windows 2000 Pro and on Slackware Linux. Both editions installed without so much as a hiccup and work identically and flawlessly.
Why any office, (no matter the size), or individual that requires basic office publishing tools, would choose to use MS Office instead of this full featured set of applications… I have no clue.
OpenOffice is not a backroom effort from some hacker. There is so much more to know about OpenOffice than I intend to go into here. Complete descriptions of this fine software is online, but as I said in the beginning of this writing, I am only touching on the surface to bring awareness of its existence to those not already familiar with it.
OpenOffice.org is free of charge and has great support from Sun. Full documentation is online at the openoffice.org website. As with any not for profit project, they do kindly ask for donations to keep the project alive and moving forward, but it is not required. It costs nothing to try it, and if you are familiar with any word processing applications, you will feel right at home with it from the start.
It’s the end of the day, and time to get out the old beer bong and look for oblivion. Crank up the tunes please….. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh 
