IBM updates free office suite, launches Lotus Symphony 1

IBM has put the finishing touches on Lotus Symphony, a free Microsoft
Office competitor based on OpenOffice.org. The company pushed out
version 1.0 of the office suite which has been available as a public
beta since last year.

Unlike OpenOffice.org, Lotus Symphony is not open source software.
While IBM is providing it for free, Lotus Symphony is based on
OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, which is the last version of OpenOffice.org that
had a license allowing developers to modify the code and keep the
changes private.

According to Linux.com, IBM hopes to target the enterprise market with
this software. The goal is to provide Lotus Symphony as a free
alternative to Microsoft Office, while charging $25,000 per year for
support. Of course, if you know how to use word processors,
spreadsheets, and presentation applications, you probably won't need
to spend the money. But you also might not find much in Lotus Symphony
that isn't already available in its open source cousin, OpenOffice.org.

So what's new in Lotus Symphony 1? Here are a few highlights:
• Critical crash and freezing issues have been fixed
• Improved performance when creating new documents, spell checking
presentations of spreadsheets, redrawing a presentation page, saving
PPT files, and performing other actions
• Improved interoperability with Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org,
and SmartSuite documents
• Added support for 4 more languages, bringing the total to 28

Lotus Symphony is available for Windows and Linux. While the only
supported Linux platforms are SUSE Enterprise Desktop 10 and Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5, you can install Lotus Symphony on other
distributions. You just might run into a few errors here and there.