Press Kit

Key facts and figures about OpenOffice.org for the media.

Naming

• Name - we are OpenOffice.org (not Open Office, OpenOffice, etc.)
• OpenOffice.org is both the name of a software product - the OpenOffice.org Productivity Suite - and the name of the open-source project which designs, develops, maintains, translates, tests, documents, supports, and promotes the Suite - the OpenOffice.org Community.

Key points about the OpenOffice.org Community

The Community is organised into projects, covering all aspects of our activity. In languages alone, we have nearly 100 language localisation projects, with over 70 supported languages currently available. Over five thousand people have signed up to take part in project activities and are Community members. As an internet based worldwide community, we do not have a physical headquarters in any one country. We have a Community bank account in Germany, and some of the bigger native-language projects have not-for-profit or equivalent status in their countries.

The overwhelming majority of Community members are volunteers. A small number (probably not more than a hundred or so) are sponsored by their employers to work on OpenOffice.org. Most of these work in software development. The Community acknowledges with gratitude the sponsorship it receives from its founding and primary sponsor, Sun Microsystems. Other significant contributors include major industry players like Novell, RedHat, RedFlag CH2000, IBM, and Google.

Key points about the OpenOffice.org Productivity Suite.

1. OpenOffice.org provides everything most people need in an office productivity suite. It is stable, reliable, and robust, built up over twenty years' development. Unlike its major competitor, it was designed from the start as a single piece of software, which makes for higher quality software and a more consistent user experience. It is actively developed, with several releases every year. The main components of the OpenOffice.org Suite are the Writer wordprocessor (screenshot); the Calc spreadsheet (screenshot); Impress for presentations (screenshot); Draw for graphics (screenshot); and the Base database (screenshot).
   
2. OpenOffice.org is both easy to use and easy to migrate to, for both experienced and beginners alike. It has a familiar user interface, and is able to read and write the vast majority of legacy file formats (including common Microsoft Office formats). It is supported in over seventy languages, with active support both Community based (free) and from commercial organisations (paid-for).
3. OpenOffice.org is released under an open-source licence (the LGPL), which means it may be used free of any licence fees, for any purpose: private, governmental, commercial, etc. Once acquired (either as a free download or as a CD) it may be installed on an unlimited number of computers, and may be copied and distributed without restriction. OpenOffice.org supports extensions, allowing users to add on extra functions easily from an extensions repository. This is a key differentiator from the competition.

OpenOffice.org is available on all major computing platforms and is supported in over seventy languages. Our best estimate is that OpenOffice.org currently enjoys over 15% market share for office productivity suites.

Potted history of OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is a mature software product, tracing its origins back over twenty years to a commercial software house in Germany, StarDivision. Following the acquisition of StarDivision by Sun Microsystems in April 1999, OpenOffice.org version 1.0 was released as open-source software on May 1st 2002. It proved hugely successful, and after more than 49 million recorded downloads, version 2.0 was released on 20th October 2005. OpenOffice.org 2 removed the last barriers to migration with a new user interface, improved support for competitors' file formats, and a new integrated database component. It also became the first office suite to support the new OpenDocument Format for office applications (ODF) natively. ODF was adopted as an ISO standard on May 1st 2006 and is the only office document format to be approved at this level. The current version of the OpenOffice.org Suite (2.4.1) was released on June 9th 2008.

Logos etc

Logos may be found here

Press Releases

We keep an on-line archive of press releases.

We also have a low volume announcements mailing list; you can browse an archive of these announcements, or subscribe to the list by sending a blank email to announce-subscribe@openoffice.org.

Contacts

Global Contacts

Please remember that these numbers DO NOT provide support for OpenOffice.org. Please DO NOT call them for support requests. Instead, please see our website at support.openoffice.org.

John McCreesh (UTC +01h00)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead
jpmcc@openoffice.org
+44 (0)7 810 278 540

Florian Effenberger (UTC +01h00)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Co-Lead
floeff@openoffice.org
+49 8341 9966 0880

Louis Suárez-Potts (UTC -04h00)
OpenOffice.org Community Manager
louis@openoffice.org
+1 (416) 625-3843

Worldwide Marketing Contacts

List of worldwide contacts.