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April 17 - April 24, 2011 |
OpenOffice Prepares to Grow
Most famous competitor to MS Office about to release long-awaited new version
By Alessandro Cancian
Originally Published: 2005-01-09
OpenOffice, the most famous open source competitor of MS Office, prepares to grow. Born from the even better known StarOffice, acquired in 1999 by Sun, OpenOffice is preparing to release version 1.1.4, which consolidates the foundations of the suite and brings its code to full maturity. The release of the new version also marks the opening of beta testing for release 2.0, possibly the most awaited due to the new features announced.
The OpenOffice project intends to give users an excellent free product, competitive with the commercial products currently dominating this sector. The suite is getting the lion's share in public administrations, such as the German city of Munich, Venezuela, China and others, which took the decision to abandon proprietary software in order to reduce costs.
OpenOffice 1.1.4, currently available for download as a Release Candidate (RC) from the Web (www.openoffice.org), will focus mostly on debugging and refining existing features.
For the diffusion and use of the code, OpenOffice.org adopted both Free Software Foundation's GNU GPL/LGPL licenses and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). The double license system is also used for several other famous open source projects, including Perl and Mozilla.
The next major release of OpenOffice, 2.0, is expected for next spring. A pre-beta version (1.9.m65) was released some time ago, while the real beta version should come this month.
One of the most remarkable novelties of version 2.0 will be the integration of the open source database engine HSQL. This addition fills a gap that OpenOffice had in comparison to its commercial competitors, StarOffice and MS Office: the former, based on the same code as OpenOffice, includes Software AG's database Adabas; the latter comes with Access.
In order to allow users without programming expertise to use HSQL, OpenOffice 2.0 will include a graphic front-end called Base: this will be useful in creating databases, reports and queries, and will be able to import files from dBase, MS Access, MySQL and other database applications.
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