“The four leaders are working with their local business partners in markets around the world to build and distribute a pre-loaded PC offering that features IBM’s Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS) including Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony and Lotus Sametime; the Linux operating system of each distributor; and software applications and installation services from the local partners in each market.”

“How come Sun and OpenOffice.org aren’t directly involved in this Microsoft-free PC effort??? Is OpenOffice.org assisting the effort at all?”

“Well yes – they’re all using our software 🙂

The OpenOffice.org community maintains the OpenOffice.org software, assisted by generous sponsorship from Sun, IBM, Novell, RedFlag, Red Hat, etc. Several of these companies then use the software as a base for their own products – Sun’s StarOffice, IBM’s Symphony, RedFlag’s RedOffice.

Canonical, Red Hat, and Novell will now have distributions both with OpenOffice.org and with IBM’s Symphony. That provides choice to their customers, as they can choose which flavour of software suits them best. The really good news is that both software packages use the ISO approved OpenDocument Format to store their documents, so people can happily swap backwards and forwards between OpenOffice.org and Symphony without losing any data, formatting, etc.

The significant difference between OpenOffice.org and MS-Office is Microsoft’s marketing budget. IBM also have considerable marketing budgets, so hopefully this will help to redress the balance.”