OpenOffice.org is one of the most popular products of the FOSS (Free/Open Source) community, and for many millions of people it is their first experience of FOSS. Key to OpenOffice.org's success has been its ability to compete openly and freely with competitors on any platform, and demonstrate that FOSS is a better choice.
Uniquely among leading office suites, OpenOffice.org provides a mechanism
for developers to build and release "extensions" to provide additional
features. Extensions can be added and removed at will by users, giving
them the freedom to tailor their own copy of OpenOffice.org to do what
they need to do. The OpenOffice.org Community has created a common
repository where users can select and download extensions.
The OpenOffice.org Community Council has been asked by the FSF to give the
FSF an effective veto over which extensions should be permitted to appear
in this repository. The Community Council has felt unable to do this. We
believe passionately that FOSS delivers better software - including
extensions, but that users must be free to make the comparison and reach
their own conclusion.
It is a fact that the vast majority of our users currently run OpenOffice.org on a proprietary operating system, alongside other proprietary software. We respect their choice, and believe the best way to influence them to change is by delivering high quality FOSS software that meets their needs.
The OpenOffice.org Community Council regrets that the FSF was unable to accept our compromise proposals for a more clearly signposted extensions repository. We believe the creation of an alternative repository will cause confusion and will lead to a poorer experience for users. However, we are more than happy to work with the FSF to encourage FOSS developers to address areas where proprietary only solutions exist.
The OpenOffice.org Community Council
http://council.openoffice.org/
Friday, May 14, 2010
OpenOffice.org is one of the most popular products of the FOSS, Free/Open Source Software
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1 comment:
I use Open Office on my computers and it works for me for the most part. There are some things that Word does better, but for general word processing and spreadsheets, Open Office works for the majority of people and it's not nearly the resource hog of Microsoft Office.
I tend to have a love/hate relationship with Linux. I will install a Linux distro, but then end up deleting it because too many of the apps that come with the distro are half baked at best and while I consider myself fairly geeky, I'm not big on digging into config files with the command line, and the Linux community on the Internet isn't well known for dealing with clueless newbies with any measure of tact.
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