OpenOffice.org is the name of the open source (GPL) version of Sun's StarOffice package. The name is "OpenOffice.org" and not "OpenOffice", because someone else already had the trademark. The name should be used as an adjective: "OpenOffice.org Application", "OpenOffice.org Community" and so on...
OpenOffice.org seems to do the same thing Mozilla did: A Big Company releases code for a freeware product, and bunch of people create a really, really, really great application package based on that - well, it just takes "some" time. =) It took years and years, but the project has now released the big 1.0.
OpenOffice.org's office package already seems pretty excellent compared to StarOffice 5.x, for example, the following things just rock:
- SO5's annoying integrated "desktop" is gone. Each document appears in separate window. Likewise MDI windows now appear less frequently, and most dialogs appear as normal dialogs that can be moved wherever you want on the screen.
- XML file formats. Each file is now a JAR archive (that is, a zip archive with Manifest file) that contains bunch of XML files containing the document content, templates and stuff like that - and a separate directory containing images. Highly nifty.
- Lack of E-Mail and Scheduler apps. Well, no one used those anway, there are better apps to do that...
- The package is smaller. Linux version of Build 638C seems to be only 75 megabytes and Windows version was even smaller... Some progress =)
It should be noted that a lot of things that apply to OO.o also apply to StarOffice 6.x, which is based on the same codebase with a couple of proprietary modules.
Web page: http://www.openoffice.org/