It feels like InformationWeek is writing more and more about open source lately, perhaps because the open source tide is rising ever higher. Last week, IW’s Serdar Yegulalp published Open-Source Office Suites Compared, which reviews OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony, KOffice and AbiWord:

“In this review I’ve taken a look at OpenOffice.org’s most recent release, along with the commercially-supported StarOffice from Sun, IBM’s reworking of OO.o as Lotus Symphony, the KOffice suite for Linux, and the minimal but still useful AbiWord. Talking about how these would entirely replace Microsoft Office would be misleading, since not everyone might be doing that — so I’ve looked at each product as far on its own merits as possible.”

Each suite has its unique strengths, and Yegulalp does a thorough job comparing their primary advantages and the factors that differentiate them.

Overall, the presence of these five major office suites as competitors, and cooperators that all support the open ODF file format, helps to encourage robust experimentation and innovation which the market has sorely lacked for well over a decade.

“Compatible competition” will bring better value and technology to all of us using these types of software tools.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.