IBM has decided that it too wants to offer a free Office suite called Lotus Symphony, and after playing with it for just a short while I have to say that I'm very impressed with the route they have taken. For starters they are working off of the OpenOffice.org technology, which in its current state is leaps and bounds ahead of many Microsoft Office alternatives.

OpenOffice.org 2.3 is on the home stretch with the first Release Candidate being made available today. It's been over 5-months since OpenOffice.org 2.2 was released, and I'm sure most users will be welcoming this update with open arms.

Google has taken yet another stab at Microsoft in hopes of luring users away from Microsoft Office. Now Google is offering StarOffice 8, which normally costs $79, as an optional download in the free Google Pack.

Microsoft is taking a new approach to Microsoft Works 9 by offering it for free (was $49.95), but with advertisements. The suite of applications that come with the Works are an address book, calendar, database (like Excel), dictionary, PowerPoint Viewer, Word (basic functionality), and templates. Doesn’t sound too bad, huh?

Bloat-free seems to be a new trend these days, first with Dell offering an option to opt-out of some of the unnecessary “stuff” and now with Wal-Mart’s new budget computer.

Have you been looking for a great word processor that fits all of your needs? There are so many options available that it is hard to review them all on your own, which is why Donation Coder took the time to assemble a very comprehensive comparison of the word processors available.

There is a new worm in town, and it is targeting OpenOffice on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux! The SB/Badbunny-A worm infects a computer when a user opens an OpenOffice Draw file called badbunny.odg. Depending on your operating system, the worm will do a variety of things:

Microsoft is throwing their weight around once again, and this time they are going against free and open-source software (FOSS). The 235 patent infringements in question are largely regarding the Linux operating system. They don’t give details as to what the patents cover, but they did break it down a little:

OpenOffice 2.2 was just released after about a month’s worth of delays. The official announcement has yet to be made on the homepage, but the downloads for OpenOffice 2.2 are currently available on their FTP.