I hope that everyone reading this blog has heard of OpenOffice.org.  OpenOffice.org is a free and open source cross-platform office suite, which can read and write MS Office .doc, .xls, and .ppt files. It actually has more to it than that, there is a drawing program, a database, a math equation editor and more. It has been in development as OpenOffice.org since 1999, when Sun Microsystems bought the code from a company called Star Division (remember StarOffice?) (You can find an aged, but perhaps useful webinar I did up on slideshare.) For 85% of what most nonprofits (and individuals) need out of MS Office, you can get in this package for free. Sorry, clippy not included. OpenOffice.org has come an incredibly long way since the old days, and it is, now, quite a credible competitor to MS Office. But then ... Oracle bought Sun. And just like the fears that many in the MySQL community have had about the future of MySQL under Oracle's watch (Oracle shut down the OpenSolaris project, for example), people were worried about the future of OpenOffice.org. And the cool thing about open source software is that in situations like this, people can fork stuff. And they did. They formed an organization called the Document Foundation, and forked the code from version 3.3 of OpenOffice.org, and called it LibreOffice. All of the major Linux distributions are going to include LibreOffice, some as the default office suite. I've already been using LibreOffice, and intend to stick with it, since IMHO, a good bet is that anything FOSS will flounder and probably die in Oracle's hands. (Which is why I am also keeping a keen eye on MySQL drop-in replacements, as well. You'll read about that one here.)