Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Sun Microsystems Inc donated its StarOffice code to the open source development community five years ago and that's when OpenOffice.org project was initiated. There have been over 50 million downloads since the project started. The development team just announced the release of version 2.0 which has been considered as a "significant milestone for the productivity software market".

There is an increasing intention of using open source products in government and educational facilities. The State of Massachusetts has chosen to move to the OpenDocument format as the standard for all office documents by January 2007. Government of India has released over 7 million OpenOffice source CDs in different native languages. Local government of Auvegne, France has passed 64 thousands of OpenOffice CDs to the students of the region.

Here at art Faculty of Arts, UBC, we have installed Open Office (Star Office) on all lab terminals (over 120 computers) for several years. Download a copy today to compare it against Microsoft Office Suite yourself, if the result is satisfying, why pay hundreds of dollars to type your daily document?

You can also use BitTorrent to download or order a CD from the website.