Just thought you’d be interested in knowing that the free and open source office suite, OpenOffice.org, is about to announce the release of their latest major version on Monday.

To prepare for this release, the final stable release of OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 has already been pushed out to the major mirrors and is making its way through the rest of the mirror network as we speak. Expect a .torrent of the platform to be available on Monday when the official announcement is made. My experience has been that the torrents are always the fastest way to get the installation files. Especially for the first few days after the official announcement of the release.

I use OpenOffice.org at home and also work because I am more comfortable using it than I am using Microsoft Office 2003 or Microsoft Office 2007. I can’t afford to license Microsoft Office for myself, so I don’t use it at home at all. Never have. Ironically, if I ever wanted to do something that required a word processor in the past, I’ve always had alternatives of some kind or another. Even resorting to LaTeX to do a C.V. at one point in my history.

One of the best features of the 2.x.x series of OpenOffice.org was the introduction of Extensions that allowed you to expand the functionality of the various applications. For example, one that I found myself using a fair bit allows me to save documents and spreadsheets directly on Google Docs. In this latest version, OpenOffice.org takes the whole Extension platform and expands it significantly by opening up even more capabilities for the extensions to access within the various suite apps. Sincerely, if you’ve ever used and liked Firefox Add-ons, you really need to check this feature of OpenOffice.org out.

There are a lot of features available in OpenOffice.org that you can’t find in Microsoft Office. There are a lot of features in Microsoft Office that you can’t find in OpenOffice.org. Ultimately, the end result is that you have to compare the two for yourself to find the one that works best for you. But in the end, can you really beat the price?

A free, legal, legitimate office suite that will not land you in gaol if you download it without paying a license fee for it. Sure, you can get Microsoft Office for free off a million places on the web. But doing so is technically illegal and will only result in you paying a HUGE settlement fee (or possibly landing you in gaol) if you do ever get caught. And as someone that used to audit computers for Microsoft, that happens a lot more often than you think.