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!