OpenOffice.org

It is commonly known as OOo or open office. In general sense, we need to buy the office package of Microsoft's Office package but this thing here is an open source software application suite avilable for many operating system for free. Ii is free to copy, modify and redistribute. It is written in its own GUI tool kit. Its defult extension is Open Document Format ( ODF ) for data interchange but it also supports Microsoft Office formats among others. Dated November 2009, Open office supports over 110 languages.

Originally it was developed by Star Division and acquired by Sun Microsystems as ' Star Office ' in August 1999. Its source code was released in July 2000. The main anim behind releasing its source code was to reduce the dominat market share of Microsoft Office by offering a free alternative. Later versions of Star Office are based upon OpenOffice.org with additional proprietary components.The OpenOffice.org project is primarily sponsored by Oracle Corporation ( initially by Sun Microsystem - the developers of Java ). Novell, Red Hat, IBM, Google and others are major corporate contributors.

It is branded as OpenOffice.org and is also included in most Linux distributions ( including Ubuntu. openSUSE and Mandriva Linux ) which is actually an un official branch called Go-oo. The project and software are commonly known as OpenOffice, but the term is a trademark held by a company in the Netherlands co-founded by Wouter Hanegraaff and is also in use by Orange UK, requiring the project to adopt OpenOffice.org as its formal name.It runs from Microsoft Windows to Linux, Solaris, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIX. As it supports so many platforms and is free to use this is the best alternative for Microsoft's Office package and you do need to give it a try if you are still using pirated version of Microsoft's Office package.