THE FINAL release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is scheduled for the 13^th of this month and launch parties are already being arranged.

OpenOffice.org is throwing a launch party in Paris on 13 October to mark the eighth anniversary of the popular open source office software suite and announce – it hopes – the release of version 3.0.

It's bad practice to be hammering on the mirrors prior to an official announcement, but impatient people already grab their copy and so can everybody else.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Final has already been uploaded to a variety of mirror download sites ahead of the official announcement Monday 13.

Novell's Michael Meeks pondersways of measuring the success of OpenOffice.org, which is used by one in four people in Brazil, for example.

Is success measured in downloads, or up-loads ? are bugs filed as good as bugs fixed ? are volunteer marketers as valuable as volunteer developers ? If we have lots of bugs filed and lots of volunteer management material is that success ? is the pace of change important ? Does successful QA exist to create process to slow and reject changes, or by accelerating inclusion of fixes improve quality ? Is success having complete, up-to-date and detailed specifications for every feature ? Is success getting everyone to slavishly obey laborious multi-step processes, before every commit ? Alternatively does success come through attracting and empowering developers, who have such fun writing the code that they volunteer their life, allegiance and dreams to improve it ?

He is taking cheap shots at Sun and we will write about that shortly.

According to a school's IT professional, OpenOffice.org is more than enough to fulfill the students' needs. More importantly, it's Free (libre) software.

For the vast majority of users (students, teachers, and administrators, especially), OpenOffice is more than good enough. The price is certainly right, too.

Here is another new post about OpenOffice.org and other Free software programs in education.

The UK Government, even more so now they have just spanked €£500bn propping up the banking system, must start to act and reduce the outrageous and completely wasteful expenditure on proprietary software. Why oh why don’t we just do a nation-wide roll out of OpenOffice.org to EVERY computer in the public sector and especially in Education? It would be a good start, and then we can get rid of that festering boil called Windows later.

* No more extortionate upgrade costs, * no more public documents created in binary, patent encumbered formats, * an end to the single vendor lock-in and monopoly, * no more two-tier children…

Now more than ever (due to the credit crunch in particular), governments must consider OpenOffice.org not just for schools but also for themselves. As the following press release stresses, ODF is essential for presentation Microsoft Office does not support ODF.

2nd Annual Global ODF Conference Convened in South Africa to Discuss Access, Choice in Document Preservation

The South African government, in collaboration with the OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance), will host the 2nd International OpenDocument Format (ODF) User Workshop, 9-10 October 2008 in Pretoria, South Africa.

The world could learn a lot from South Africa where freedom is understood better or appreciated much more because it was only recently regained (decades ago). ⬆