OpenOffice Beijing Conference is open

The 6th OpenOffice Annual Conference 2008 in Beijing is almost ready. I just got a nice entry pass from the organizing committee--it's all red hot, full of energy and I can feel the power of open source.

The opening ceremony will be held at DiaoYutai State Guesthouse tomorrow morning, where is a high level conference place for most national conferences. We have two days set aside for communication and meetup at Peking University Overseas Exchange Center. I think there will be more than 500 people joining the grand conference organized for all of open source people.

OpenOffice.org today is widely used around the world, but for the new version OpenOffice 3.0, I would still like to give a brief introduce about the software suite--touching on topics like why we should use it, and how to contributor to this great open source project.

1. Why OpenOffice?
OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format, and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

2. A great software
OpenOffice.org 3 is the result of over 20 years' software engineering. Designed from the start as a single piece of software, it has a consistency other products cannot match. A completely open development process means that anyone can report bugs, request new features, or enhance the software. The result: OpenOffice.org 3 does everything you want your office software to do, the way you want it to.

3. Better open source license
OpenOffice.org 3 can be downloaded and used entirely free of any licence fees. OpenOffice.org 3 is released under the LGPL licence. This means you may use it for any purpose--domestic, commercial, educational, public administration. You may install it on as many computers as you like. You may make copies and give them away to family, friends, students, employees--anyone you like.

4. How to contribute OpenOffice enhancements
OpenOffice always welcomes new contributors, especially new programmers. But no matter what your skills and interests are, there is a site where you can participate to improve OpenOffice. Here, you can:

- you can submit programming on OpenOffice code
- you can help develop marketing initiatives to spread the adoption of the software
- you can write about OpenOffice and your user experience
- you can help other users if you are skilled in it
- you can make some monetary donation
- you can translate it to yourlanguage

If you are in town this week, do join us at the conference. Visit the site for more information.

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Peter Cheng

Peter Cheng is a community strategist and open source evangelist, who is based in Beijing, China. In 2003, he initiated the Open Source University program to gather industry experts and help spread open source technology and culture to over 100 universities. In 2007, he organized the Open Source Camp in five Chinese cities, with the aim to enable the open source community to share and exchange ideas and to promote the technology in China. Peter currently runs TargetSource Tech, a company he founded to provide consulting services on enterprise open source software.