Stories about: OpenOffice

You gotta love it. Microsoft has decided that it will ho ahead and kill off easy access to XP on June 30th. On behalf of desktop Linux users everywhere, and our first cousins, the Mac fans, thanks. You've given us the best shot we'll ever have of taking the desktop.

Microsoft warned us well over a year ago that XP will Die Die Die, at least on new computers, by the end of June, 2008. Petitions and prayers notwithstanding, XP has a firm date with Boot Hill. RIP, XP.

Long adept at staving off targeted threats to its core revenue streams, by 2013 Microsoft finally fell prey to the micromarket effect. Linux on increasingly popular UMPCs (ultramobile PCs), the rise of OpenOffice in developing nations, and the customized productivity app marketplace borne of Google's App Engine application-hosting service and its Salesforce and eBay acquisitions -- all chipped deeply enough into Microsoft's core customer base that the company finally had to loosen its grip on the computing industry's once-best legal license to print money, its Office and Windows software business.

Microsoft's a dinosaur that didn't know its dead yet. The cloud computing meteor was speeding its way, and when pervasive computing in the cloud became a reality in about 2015, Microsoft was all but dead. Why? Because the Windows and Office revenues collapsed as users finally stop buying upgrades they don't need, and cloud offerings via the browser took their place. Poof! Gone was 80 percent of Microsoft's profits. And gone was the money to invest in technologies that took multiple versions to get right -- if they ever got it right -- such as the Xbox, Zune, Microsoft Dynamics, and MSN.

Open Source Law founder, Brendan Scott, discusses the legal implications of FOSS in Australian government and enterprise organisations.

A half-year after becoming president and CEO of Linux vendor Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst was in Boston last week for the annual Red Hat Summit. The former COO of Delta Air Lines sat down with Network World's Jon Brodkin to discuss open source, a new patent settlement, and Red Hat's moves in virtualization.

The launch of Microsoft's new interoperability principles have been both cautiously welcomed and sceptically scrutinised as the company goes about convincing the IT industry that it is genuine in its pursuit to provide interoperability with rival products, more consumer choice, less vendor lock-in and greater collaboration with the open source community.

A new breed of extremely small and light (2 pounds or so) laptop has emerged just in time for summer travel. Called mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and also known as mini-laptops, mini-notebooks, or mini-notes, these lightweight laptops are practically naked, stripped of all extraneous features. And starting at around US$400, they're far cheaper than other mobile PCs.

OpenOffice 3.0 shows that you don't have to pay a bundle for a great office suite -- in fact, you don't even have to pay a penny.

No one loves to pay crazy per-user licensing fees, not to mention 15- 22 per cent annual support residuals. (And no one loves the endless, mind-numbing meetings with non-technical financial folks trying to pry budget for these tools from their clenched fists.) So today we're going to discuss tools that are free. However, we are not naming them to this list of "great" tools simply because they cost nothing. These are some of the best lesser-known tools out there.

IBM didn't become a US$100 billion-a-year business by playing the discount game.