---
layout: default
title: "An Open Answer to Office"
description: "A Hindu feature on OpenOffice 3.2, examining the free and open source office suite's capabilities, Indian language support and adoption challenges."
categories: [Media mentions]
date: 2010-03-14
authors: ["Deepa Kurup"]
source: "The Hindu"
permalink: /media/open-answer-office-hindu/
created: 2026-01-18
---

**An Open Answer to Office** is a *The Hindu* feature published on 14 March 2010 by Deepa Kurup. The article reviews OpenOffice 3.2's improvements and examines the free and open source productivity suite's role in enabling Indian language computing, whilst considering its adoption prospects following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

## Contents

1. [Article Details](#article-details)
2. [Full Text](#full-text)
3. [Context and Background](#context-and-background)
4. [External Link](#external-link)

## Article Details

<dl class="media-details">
<dt>📰 Published in:</dt>
<dd><em>The Hindu</em></dd>

<dt>📅 Date:</dt>
<dd>14 March 2010</dd>

<dt>👤 Authors:</dt>
<dd>Deepa Kurup</dd>

<dt>📍 Location:</dt>
<dd>Bangalore</dd>

<dt>📄 Type:</dt>
<dd>Feature</dd>

<dt>📰 Newspaper Link:</dt>
<dd>
<a class="btn" href="https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/An-open-answer-to-Office/article16566957.ece">
Read Online
</a> (Subscription required)
</dd>
</dl>

## Full Text

<div class="highlighted-text" id="fulltext">

<p>The decade-old OpenOffice was the Free and Open Source riposte to Microsoft's Office that has entrenched itself in the office productivity suite segment.</p>

<p>Originally a proprietary software application that was open-sourced by Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice has come a long way, with the release of its new-improved version 3.2. Today, having crossed 300 million downloads — a third of this over the last year — this community project is among the most successful stand-alone Open Source products.</p>

<p>Data legacy and incompatibility issues, as a majority of office software was already using proprietary applications, and widespread piracy, retarded early growth. Constantly competing with MS Office, it got better with successive iterations, though it has not quite caught up. The latest version, Office 2010, is due for release and offers browser versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, across the PC, mobile phone and browser.</p>

<p><strong>OpenOffice 3.2</strong></p>

<p>The most in-your-face improvements of OpenOffice 3.2 Writer are the reduced start-up time (down by 46 per cent, it claims) and more features on Calc, its spreadsheet programme. It offers improved compatibility with proprietary file formats, including password-protected files, and increased compliance with Open Document Format (ODF) standards that have now been adopted by several countries.</p>

<p><strong>Why OpenOffice?</strong></p>

<p>For starters, OpenOffice is free — as in free beer and freedom/liberty, to roughly borrow the famous Richard Stallman analogy for Free Software. So when MS Office 2007 for home users costs Rs 3,000, and between Rs.14,000 and Rs.17,000 for professionals, OpenOffice is free.</p>

<p>Though the frills and fancies are missing in the user interface, including simple features like a thesaurus, for a regular user what OpenOffice offers is basic and adequate.</p>

<p>As for the "freedom" it offers, OpenOffice has driven localisation in a big way. Sunil Abraham, director of the Centre for Internet and Society, points out that its support for language computing is key. OpenOffice is available in 26 Indian languages (led by the CDAC's BharateeyaOO team and independent FOSS communities), years before proprietary options were available. Even today, Microsoft's Office Suite offers 12 languages, while OpenOffice offers dictionaries, thesaurus, spelling and grammar check.</p>

<p>Though it has not been widely adopted in the way it is in Europe, there are some success stories, Mr. Abraham says. For instance, the Delhi government and the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu are migrating to OpenOffice.</p>

<p><strong>New acquisition</strong></p>

<p>With proprietary giant Oracle recently acquiring Sun Microsystems, the FOSS community that has contributed reams of code to Sun's Open Source project — like OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, and more importantly MySQL — is apprehensive. But with no competing Office products, there is little reason for Oracle to kill OpenOffice. Michael Bemmer, general manager of Global Business Unit, asserts OpenOffice will remain Open Source and free. "The Oracle Office product family will be the first desktop-to-web-to-mobile solution centred on the ODF document standard — running on any platform, any device."</p>

</div>

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## Context and Background

The article appeared following the release of OpenOffice 3.2 and shortly after Oracle Corporation's completion of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January 2010. Sun had open-sourced the StarOffice codebase in 2000, creating OpenOffice.org as a community-driven alternative to Microsoft Office. By 2010, the project had accumulated over 300 million downloads, though market penetration remained limited compared to Microsoft's dominant position.

OpenOffice's significance in India extended beyond cost savings. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing's BharateeyaOO initiative and independent free and open source software communities had localised OpenOffice for 26 Indian languages, providing dictionaries, spelling checkers and grammar tools years before Microsoft offered comparable support. This linguistic accessibility made OpenOffice particularly valuable for government digitization initiatives and education programmes.

Oracle's acquisition raised concerns within the free software community about the company's commitment to open source projects. These apprehensions proved prescient: tensions over governance led key developers to fork OpenOffice in 2010, creating LibreOffice under the Document Foundation. Oracle eventually donated the OpenOffice codebase to the Apache Software Foundation in 2011, though LibreOffice became the more actively developed successor project.

## External Link

- [Read on The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/An-open-answer-to-Office/article16566957.ece) (Subscription required)

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