Get legal - Get OpenOffice.Org

As part of my past (and future) campaigns, I have given out hundreds of CDs with music, message and OPEN SOURCE software. Of course these political CDs include an installer for OpenOffice.org 2.0.

One week after "World Intellectual Property Day", the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project announces a new campaign: "Get legal - Get OpenOffice.org". A new website - http://why.openoffice.org - explains how to escape from Microsoft Office licence costs and compliance worries - for good. Webmasters and bloggers worldwide are encouraged to display the campaign banner to help promote the campaign.

2006 has seen proprietary software companies and their agencies increase their efforts to stamp out illegal copies of their software. Last week, the Business Software Alliance used "World Intellectual Property Day" to announce a record reward for anyone informing against illegal software in UK organisations. Microsoft acquired a company specialising in detecting software installed on PCs. Microsoft also announced its intention to extend its use of the internet to put piracy detection software into copies of MS-Office on people's PCs.

For many users, this is a worrying development. Microsoft licences are often complex, and it is easy to become non-compliant, especially as the number of PCs in an organisation increases. Illegal copying has proliferated in many developing countries, where foreign currency is scarce and proprietary licence fees are simply unaffordable.

OpenOffice.org 2 offers a simple way out of the licence trap. OpenOffice.org 2 is a free alternative to Microsoft Office products such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Powerpoint. OpenOffice.org 2 is released under an open-source licence: anyone may use the software for any purpose (including commercial). Users are encouraged to pass on copies to friends, family, students, employees, citizens - anyone.

OpenOffice.org 2 uses files created by Microsoft Office equivalents. Users need little or no retraining. Studies have shown that the costs of migrating to OpenOffice.org 2 are minimal - a tenth of the cost of migrating to the new Microsoft Office 2007.

No wonder a poll has shown 86% of users would prefer to try OpenOffice.org 2 rather than buy Microsoft Office 2007.

Get freedom from licence worries - Get Legal - Get OpenOffice.org.

About the OpenOffice.org Community

The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, support, and promote the leading open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org 2. OpenOffice.org 2 is released under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL).

The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a number of companies, including Sun Microsystems (founding sponsor and primary contributor), Novell, Red Hat, Intel, and Google.

Links

The campaign website http://why.openoffice.org contains links to the studies referenced in this press release. The OpenOffice.org Community can be found at http://www.openoffice.org. OpenOffice.org 2 may be downloaded free of charge from http://download.openoffice.org. Further information about the suite may be found at
http://www.openoffice.org/product

Press Contacts

John McCreesh (UTC +01h00)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Co-Lead
jpmcc@openoffice.org
+44 (0)7 810 278 540

Cristian Driga (UTC +0200)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Co-Lead
cdriga@openoffice.org
+40 7887 000 60

Louis Suarez-Potts (UTC -04h00)
OpenOffice.org Community Manager
louis@openoffice.org
+1 (416) 625 3843

Worldwide Marketing Contacts:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html

Attribution

Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.