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Many groups of IT experts are convinced that open source is the way of the future. Already today over 90% of the web is powered by open source software, and that software is at least as robust as that produced by commercial vendors.
Experiences and solutions for problems are exchanged within communities, usually groups of people staying in contact through online forums in a very collegial way.
Those virtual discussion platforms are an essential part for the improvement process for open software and represent a great possibility to throw projects to a merited status of competition to proprietary software.
Just till now OpenOffice.org has reached almost 19 million downloads from its official sites. Since the software can be given away freely, this total could mean that some 60-80 million copies are floating around. In comparison, the unofficial word is that StarOffice has sold some 50 million licenses.
These are respectable figures for software whose release history is less than two years old. If the development proceeds as fast as till now it seems likely that, long after StarOffice has overcome in general obscurity, its real competition won\'t be Microsoft Office, but could be OpenOffice.org.
Conclusion:
Summarizing all points, there can be found many apparently convincing arguments for OpenOffice. Thanks to the fast growing community of OpenOffice.org it was possible to reach such a success. New ideas and functionalities have been implemented to this project in a very efficient way. Already today OpenOffice is delivering a collection of valuable applications for standard office requirements. If the quick improvement of quality and usability keeps going on, it is predictable that in a few years OpenOffice.org will gain a highly popularity on the international software market and maybe brake Microsoft's monopoly.
Recommendations:
Interested users, willing to give a try to this open source tool, have the advantage do not to have to leave their familiar operating system i.e. Windows. OpenOffice.org can be installed on any operating system and can as such be used by everyone without mayor effort.
Initially, as any new and unknown software, OpenOffice might look a bit unusually to a user familiar with Microsoft Office®.
I recommend to not to uninstall it immediately, but instead trying to create some simple documents with this environment and to get familiarity with the provided tools. Obviously not all functionalities have already the maturity of Microsoft Office®, but it is predictable that all remaining bugs will be eliminated in the following editions, that hopefully will come out soon.
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