Open Office v2.0 for Mac OS X Released!

Hooray! Open Office 2.0 for the Macintosh has been released. This'll likely be the last version of Open Office for the Macintosh to run under the X11 environment as the developers have decided to stop developing the X11 version and begin working on a native Aqua version of Open Office as reported here a few weeks ago.

While I don't personally loathe Microsoft Office as much as some of my colleagues, I do think that competition is good. I've finally given up as a lost cause on my secret wish for WordPerfect to be ported over to Mac OS X. It was my hope that Corel would release a version of WordPerfect to compete with Word, or that Apple would release a less anemic version of AppleWorks. But it's never happened.

I'm pleased to see the Open Office team making progress and am happy they've decided to work on a native version. Of course, this version requires you have the X11 environment installed on your Mac, which you can (for Panther users) download or (for Tiger users) install from your Mac OS X  Tiger Installer CDs/DVD.

You can download Open Office 2.0 for Mac OS X here.

Note: Technically, this is the 3rd final release candidate and will probably be the final final candidate unless a showstopping bug crops up.