Louis Suarez-Potts, community manager of the OpenOffice.org project, told DesktopLinux.com that the latest version incorporates plenty of bug fixes, and should be much cleaner than RC1. It also features the OOoDic Autopilot which lets users download automatically any one of 87 spelling, hyphenation and thesaurus dictionaries and supplies better support for languages that use a comma instead of a full stop as a decimal point.

According to Forrester Research, over eight per cent of large US companies have installed the free software package. A Forrester survey of 140 companies found 69 were using some form of open source software; 12 had already installed OpenOffice and eight more were planning to do so.

While the Kuma:War launch package, produced by Kuma Reality Games, focuses on incidents from the Iraq war, subscribers to the website can also play out key moments in Afghanistan and the dispute between North and South Korea. It costs $10 a month for unlimited access to a growing number of continually updated missions, during which gamers re-enact the events at close quarters, and through gamesmanship, try alternative OpenOffice has also caught the attention of Microsoft. It has issued sales guidelines to resellers explaining how to sell against OpenOffice. It advises dealers to "Question the ‘free’ argument, question the ‘good enough’ argument and to show the total value delivered by Microsoft".

Source: The Register