Stories about: OpenOffice.org

Support for Mac OS X and improved document format support are some of the improvements in Sun Microsystems' StarOffice 9, which was released on Monday.

Sun Microsystems and IBM Wednesday announced the Open Document Format Toolkit Union, an open-source project aimed at making it easier for developers to use ODF.

Microsoft said via a company blog Wednesday that Service Pack 2 (SP2) of Office 2007 will ship between February and April of next year.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 was downloaded 3 million times in its first week, with about 80 percent of the downloads by Windows users, an official with the group said in a blog post on Monday.

When it came time for Washington, D.C., to create a new intranet for city employees, spending US$4 million on a site based on proprietary portal software just didn't seem like a good idea to CTO Vivek Kundra. But using Google Apps did, he said in an interview Tuesday.

IBM is threatening to leave organizations that set standards for software interoperability because of concerns that their processes are not always fair.

As Microsoft officially released its Application Virtualization 4.5 software this week, it also announced several licensing changes around virtual desktops and application virtualization, while omitting a long-anticipated one.

A recent study of Web browser installations showed that far too few are up to date with the latest security patches. And browsers aren't alone; as my dear old mum can attest, it can be hard to keep up with OS and application patches when all you want to do is use your computer for work. It should come as no surprise that many PCs are vulnerable to security exploits that could otherwise be prevented.

SourceForge.net's annual Community Choice Awards, designed to honor open source software projects in a variety of categories, have concluded. This year's awards were open to any open source projects, not just ones that were hosted on SourceForge.net, so they promised to be an accurate representation of the entire field.

Proprietary software vendors, movie companies and the music industry aren't the only businesses that don't like pirates stealing, copying and reselling their CDs and DVDs.

Web-based office suites are coming into their own at last. For quite a while, Web-based suites -- which offered word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other tools associated with desktop office suites -- were extolled not because they did these things well, but because they could do them at all. But the three major competitors, Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps.