14 DAY TRIAL // After introducing Star Office 8 a few days ago, Sun announced that the non-commercial version, OpenOffice, will be released soon. The first RC is ready and it can be found here.
Comparable to StarOffice 8, OpenOffice improves the compatibility with MS Office and contains a text processor, a multimedia presentation program, a table application and also a database application.
OpenOffice is based on the OASIS OpenDocument XML standard, which is recommended by the European Commission.
Another open source standard employed by OpenOffice 2.0 is W3C XForms, which is used to create a variety of forms.
OpenOffice is regarded by the Open Source community as MS Office's main competitor. The next version of MS Office, 12, is scheduled to appear during next year and it will introduce te OpenXML format.
Recently, the state of Massachusetts has recommended the official usage of the OpenDocument standard, which stands for a new victory for Open Office.
OpenOffice is available for Windows, Linux, Macintosh, Solaris x86 and Sparc.