Five years and one week after Sun Microsystems Inc donated its StarOffice code to the open source community and set up the OpenOffice.org project, the release of version 2.0 could mark a significant milestone for the productivity software market.
The State of Massachusetts has chosen to move to the OpenDocument format as the standard for all office documents by January 2007, and Sun’s chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, has noted that other government organizations now have a free, formal release to consider.
One government body that is likely to quickly adopt the software is the City of Vienna in Austria, which is a member of the OpenOffice.org community and committed earlier this year to roll out OpenOffice.org to its 18,000 desktop users.
The OpenDocument format is based on the XML schema developed by the OpenOffice.org community and was approved as a standard by the Oasis standards group in May. It has subsequently been submitted to the International Organization for Standardization for consideration as an international standard.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 also includes a new database module, OpenOffice Base, capable of creating self-contained portable database files, enhanced support for the exportation of files in the PDF format, and improvements to the Calc spreadsheet application, among other things.
The new version is initially available in 36 languages and supports Microsoft Corp’s Windows, Linux, Sun’s Solaris, and Apple Computer Inc’s Mac OS X via the X11 windowing system. As well as OpenOffice.org, Sun’s packaged and supported version of the code, StarOffice 8 was released at the end of September and is priced at under $70 for download, and under $100 for retail.
