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There's an interesting article at InfoWorld about changes Oracle has made to the Open Office suite. In particular, they've removed/crippled the module that allows read/write of Microsoft formats and require you to purchase a $90 module to replace it. Apparently there's a 100 unit minimum purchase.

I'm unsure of when this will or did take place, but it may start affecting operations with newer installs where the interoperability is important. It appears there may be a cheaper module that you may purchase for a lot less money and minimum quantity.

There's also an offshoot from OO called LibreOffice but not too up on that yet.

Edit: On closer reading, they may mean the object mentioned above is for the Microsoft Office suite and not OO.

avskip wrote:In particular, they've removed/crippled the module that allows read/write of Microsoft formats

That's not what I read from that article - what was removed was a plugin for MS Office users to read/write to OpenOffice's native format. I didn't even know such a plugin existed, much less used it.

At this point I think the product is the same as it ever was. What's news is there's a spat going on and we'll have to see where this goes.

RussellHltn wrote:That's not what I read from that article - what was removed was a plugin for MS Office users to read/write to OpenOffice's native format. I didn't even know such a plugin existed, much less used it.

At this point I think the product is the same as it ever was. What's news is there's a spat going on and we'll have to see where this goes.

Guess we'll have to see what they do with it.

This FAQ explains how/why LibreOffice came into existence.

This means that it will be always free, even if Oracle change his mind about OpenOffice.