Word's Open-Source Competition

The latest version of the free OpenOffice suite promises to be a strong competitor to Microsoft Office. It's still in beta, but it's already a good alternative -- and you can't argue with the price.
OpenOffice is the fruit of a collaboration between Sun Microsystems and volunteer programmers around the world. Sun bought a German company in 1999 to get office software to bundle with its computers but figured that it wasn't going to make big bucks selling the software to a wider market because of Microsoft's grip. So it released portions of the code to the public.
[I use OpenOffice. My review: It does the same job as Microsoft Office with fewer annoyances. And it's free. -- McLir]