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LibreOffice, the spin-off open source program from the old Open Office project (now uneasily chaperoned by Oracle since their purchase of Sun), has launched already, a scant few months after springing into life. For those who don’t know, this free office suite is a complete replacement for the Microsoft Office product, with word-processing, presentation, spreadsheet, drawing et al.
The new program will be instantly familiar to anyone used to Open Office, file compatibility with MS Office remains solid and overall it’s a pleasure to use. The new software is clearly going to make a big impact on the whole open source ideology, and gives a clear warning to companies like Oracle and Microsoft that they mess with the open source community at their peril.
Expect to see a lot more of this product as big names such as Google, Novell and Red Hat are firmly behind this new initiative. Nice one!
LibreOffice is the free power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. Support and documentation is free from our large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers.
About the Author:
Nigel is the managing editor of the Red Ferret, as well as a freelance columnist for the Sunday Times newspaper in London. Loves tech and fancies himself as a bit of a futurist, but then don't we all?
Nigel – who has written 5163 posts on The Red Ferret Journal.
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