Yesterday Open Office 3.0 was officially launched. This is a major new release of the open source, free, office productivity suite that provides functions such as word processing, which has historically been pretty much the sole preserve of Microsoft’s Office package. The demand for the new software has been so strong that the Open Office website has been crashed out for the last day or so.
I was excited at first as the release promises a native version for the Mac OS X system. In the past one could only run Open Office on the Mac through an X11 window (which basically meant you had to download and run additional software and using this slowed things down considerably).
However, I gather that the new version has been built only for the newer, Intel-based Macs and, unfortunately, we are still using PowerPC systems in our office. To my knowledge this is the first major piece of software that has had this restriction. Perhaps the day has come for an office re-fit.
Tech Lunch 