Freed of Executive Constraints, Jonathan Schwartz Blogs on Threats from the Competition
With his tenure in Sun’s executive suite behind him, Jonathan Schwartz exercises his new found liberty to disclose two incidents involving Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and their respective threats to sue Sun for patent infringement. Schwartz relates how Sun successfully played the countersuit card, staving off the threatened litigation.
Release Set for November 2009
In his blog entry “Security and Privacy Feature Improvements in upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.2″ Malte Timmermann considers features users will find in the next release of the solution.
Danish Hospital Reports Key is Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office
Exchanging ODF-based documents with users of Microsoft Office 2003 has proven to be not only easy but a real cost saver for the Danish Arhus University Hospital in Risskov. An OpenOffice.org facility for the past five years, the hospital has experienced the improvements the open source software suite has made in the exchange of ODF documents with Microsoft’s proprietary alternative and reported in a recent article that the free Sun ODF plugin has solved any issues.
Notes Added Features Bring More Professional Appeal 
A deep dive look at OpenOffice.org 3.1 by PC Pro Contributing Editor Simon Jones praises the latest version’s new features, adding that, although considered a minor upgrade, this release brings “polish to the nearest thing Microsoft Office has to a competitor.” Jones particularly likes the improvements in the anti-aliasing of graphics, which makes the clarity of charts and drawings much better, and the showing of shadow objects while dragging. He writes that “these two features alone make OpenOffice look much more professional.”
Encryption Process Explained, Demonstrates Strength
Malte Timmermann answers questions about OpenOffice.org for Open Document Format (ODF) documents. He specifically delves into the encryption process, asserting that it can be considered quite strong. ODF is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. ODF documents are Zip archives, Timmermann explains, and the encryption is applied to all ODF relevant streams, and not to the zip archive itself.
Improvements Help 3.1 Rank with Microsoft Office
OpenOffice.org 3.1 has made a hit with eWeek.com Editor Jason Brooks who approves at length of the changes, especially those made to Calc. He pronounces OpenOffice 3.1 a worthy challenger to Microsoft Office. Both Microsoft and OpenOffice.org have worked successfully, Brooks writes, to improve compatibility between the two solutions.
The Linux Community Registers High Marks for Sun’s Open Source Software Suite
Download the next significant upgrade of Sun’s open source software suite, OpenOffice 3.1, which adds improved graphics via antialiased drawings to smooth the edges of graphics, better file-locking support for multi-user environments, replying to notes, improved grammar checking, hyperlink management and sorting, control of slideshow media, macro support for Open Office Base, relative database paths, better internationalization for Hebrew and Arabic plus performance improvements. OpenOffice.org recently was selected as the Linux Journal Readers’ Choice for Favorite Office Program.
The Bottom Line Increasingly Drives Decisions to Move Away from Proprietary Solutions
Focusing largely on the increasing number of OpenOffice downloads, Sean Dodson writes in an article for The Guardian, “Open source apps are no small free beer,” that was the case concerning open source early on — “free” meant users were free to do with open source software as they wished, in the view of Richard Stallman — the more pressing meaning of free these days has very much to do with the cost of doing business. In support of his point, Dodson cites Gartner analyst Bianca Granetto, who says, “Open source has long been an open question, but the economic recession is making it a viable alternative.”
Cost Savings Revealed
This Sun Whitepaper examines the potential cost savings of StarOffice 9 and OpenOffice.org over Microsoft Office 2007 by providing a direct cost comparison of an office suite deployment. This study focuses on examining the costs by analyzing an organization with 1,000 desktops with a typical number of documents and Microsoft Office macros.
Developer Community Making Many Contributions to OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris
Simon Phipps, Sun’s chief open-source officer, was interviewed by Alex Serpo of ZDNet.com.au on the subjects of the MySQL acquisition and community engagement in both OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris. He spoke about the long-term consequences of acquiring MySQL and praised the community contributions to both OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris.
