OpenOffice.org (OOo) is an open source free office suite for producing word processor documents, slide presentations, spreadsheets, and now with version 2.0, databases. You get the drift.

Here are the reasons why we should be using it:

1. It has no licensing fee for its use. Many people are using an unlicensed copy of proprietary office suites, i.e: one they haven’t paid to license.
   • This is definitely illegal, and is ethically questionable. It is better to use one that we are legally licensed to use.
   • Using illegal software exposes you to the risk of having your premises raided and hefty fines imposed. Especially if you are an organization, rather than just an individual, the consequences are grave.
   • Using a legally licensed office suite that has no licensing cost rightly situates you legally and ethically, and saves you money in doing so.
2. It uses open formats for its documents
   Openoffice.org fully supports the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, recently adopted by the Massachusetts State Government as their document storage format. Your data, when saved using proprietary formats such as the .doc and .ppt formats used by Microsoft, is stored in a secret format that is not legally accessible using anything other the proprietary software that created it.
   • With proprietary formats, although you generated the documents, you are not free to open them without paying a licensing fee to use the proprietary software. You have legally ceded control of that information to the proprietary software vendor, as you cannot legally access that information without paying to use their software - forever.
   • You force anyone else with whom you might wish to share the information to either a) pay to license the proprietary software in order to access the document, or b) use an illegal copy of the proprietary software to access the information. Presently OpenOffice.org can view, edit, and save documents created in Microsoft Office. However, this functionality has been reverse-engineered and cannot be guaranteed to always be present.
3. OpenOffice.org is available on more platforms than proprietary office suites.
   OpenOffice.org is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Microsoft Office is not available for Linux. Microsoft’s refusal to support the ODF (Open Document Format), claiming that “no customers want it” even though the State Government in Massachusetts has kicked out Microsoft Office from 80,000 machines because it doesn’t support it, and their refusal to a) provide Office for Linux, or b) allow their formats to be legally opened in Linux, are part of a strategy to limit people’s freedom of choice and maintain vendor lock-in at both the operating system and application level.

OpenOffice.org is technically equivalent to other proprietary office suites in terms of functionality for 95% of people who use it. Only very advanced users requiring highly specific functionality may find that it does not do exactly what they want. I have been using it since v.1.1 and it has done everything I need to do.

OpenOffice.org is free in terms of both cost, and in terms of free speech. I recommend that everyone download a copy and start to use it, and use the ODF formats for document interchange, rather than continuing to use proprietary office suites.

Thank you.