Why OpenOffice.org 2.0 is important 


Why is OpenOffice.org 2.0 important? and why is this post not marketing? The two questions get the same answer.

But first, in case you want OOo but the mirrors are busy, use the P2P system: http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/download.html.

Now to the question at hand: Why is 2.0 important? The most obvious answer would place the application in some Manichean frame, a good vs. evil, light against dark, and that would be silly, if not entirely wrong. Yes, the technology is better and is open, yes, the file format lends itself to democratic discourse and is open, yes, the process is efficient and is open and yes, I think these are good things and that their opposite--closed, proprietary, secretive--generally less good. But I'm not a religious opponent of proprietary software or production, nor blind to the serious problems of cooperative collaboration. OOo, as I've argued in Brazil, Russia, India and elsewhere for the last year, suffers from opacity in key decision making, for instance, and so do many other FOSS projects.

But I think the main reason OpenOffice.org 2.0 is important is because it gives many, many users the possibility of meaningful difference. They can see that open source works. They can see that it produces commodities that they like. They can perhaps begin to see even *how* it works, and that it depends on an active community of users as well as producers, and that the two often blur. 

Why is OpenOffice.org 2.0 important? and why is this post not marketing? The two questions get the same answer.

But first, in case you want OOo but the mirrors are busy, use the P2P system: http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/download.html.

Now to the question at hand: Why is 2.0 important? The most obvious answer would place the application in some Manichean frame, a good vs. evil, light against dark, and that would be silly, if not entirely wrong. Yes, the technology is better and is open, yes, the file format lends itself to democratic discourse and is open, yes, the process is efficient and is open and yes, I think these are good things and that their opposite--closed, proprietary, secretive--generally less good. But I'm not a religious opponent of proprietary software or production, nor blind to the serious problems of cooperative collaboration. OOo, as I've argued in Brazil, Russia, India and elsewhere for the last year, suffers from opacity in key decision making, for instance, and so do many other FOSS projects.

But I think the main reason OpenOffice.org 2.0 is important is because it gives many, many users the possibility of meaningful difference. They can see that open source works. They can see that it produces commodities that they like. They can perhaps begin to see even *how* it works, and that it depends on an active community of users as well as producers, and that the two often blur.

Enjoy OOo 2.0. And download and use the Mac version, created by Eric Bachard and his team. See http://macosxrc.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/ooomisc/MacOSXrc/



 

Posted: Thu - October 20, 2005 at 09:57 AM          

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