OpenOffice Conference Coverage Barcelona - Initial Thoughts

The annual OpenOffice.org Conference (OOo) is taking place in Barcelona, Spain this year. Formal events, including two keynotes, will kick off the conference on Wednesday, but several pre-conference events have already taken place. The only one I was able to attend was the NLC (Native Language Confederation) party on Tuesday night.

The setting of the event, as for the entire conference, was the Universitat de Barcelona, an extraordinary old building replete with multiple courtyards full of several species of old trees (not recognizable from my native climate zone of New York City!), flowering shrubs, and koi ponds. As evening fell, several bats came out to feed while cats gamboled about the grounds.

Starting the conference with a language localization-oriented event was a good way to draw attention to one of OpenOffice.org's great strengths, especially relevant here in Catalonia where language, culture and history are so deeply tied.

OOo has been localized to over 100 languages, more than Microsoft Office or any other office suite can match. Due to continued investment in localizing OpenOffice.org for communities across the world, it is adding more languages and increasing its lead over rivals at a steady pace. For users in developing countries, this will make the decision to adopt OOo much easier.

In fact, the "long tail" concept can be applied to global languages: communities that are able to adapt open source programs to function in their native tongues will do so, and hundreds of languages with relatively few speakers will be served by FOSS tools. Proprietary software makers will never be willing to spend the resources they would need to compete, and will have to cede these markets to open source.

Editor's note: This conference coverage was provided by Benjamin Horst who is an OpenOffice.org volunteer and creator of the Wikipages.com wiki business directory.