October saw the much-anticipated release of OpenOffice 2.0 (www.openoffice.org), the latest version of the open source application suite that is free – yes, completely free – for anyone to download and use.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of open source software, it is effectively the ‘voluntary sector’ of software development, in which software programmers and users work co-operatively to develop and test applications for the benefit of all, rather than for the narrow benefit of those wielding intellectual property claims and copyrights.

OpenOffice is one of the open source world’s leading products, offering full compatibility with the market-dominating Microsoft Office suite, yet at an obviously unbeatable price. Although it can use the open standards-compliant OASIS document format, OpenOffice also opens and saves documents in Microsoft’s proprietary formats (doc, xls, ppt), meaning that documents can be shared with Microsoft Office users without them suspecting a difference.

What’s more, OpenOffice offers as standard features that other office application users need to buy third-party products to have, such as creating PDF documents straight from any text document, spreadsheet or presentation.

For an increasing number of organisations and governments, the philosophical argument of not committing all one’s valuable data to a proprietary format owned by a private company is ample reason to move to OpenOffice. But if that’s not enough reason on its own, saving your organisation thousands of pounds in the hefty license fees and frequent upgrades required of those on the proprietary software treadmill surely must be, particularly for charities and social enterprises on a tight budget.

Why not make the switch? It can’t be lack of support, for the worldwide network of developers and users offers advice and solutions that rival the best offerings of private software companies. And in the open source world, you can even suggest new features to be incorporated into the next release of the product.

For those too timid to make a wholesale change to OpenOffice, consider that, in most organisations, there are only a handful of information ‘creators’ – the heavy users of word processing, spreadsheets and presentations – while the rest are mainly information ‘consumers’, rarely using their office applications to do more than view text and spreadsheet files. Switching your organisation’s information ‘consumers’ to OpenOffice is unlikely to cause a stir and can be a good way of test driving the benefits and cost savings of the open source world.

Geoffrey Ready is managing consultant with Avec Solutions, a social economy company providing IT and management consultancy primarily to the not-for-profit sector. Many of Avec Solutions’ services are built around open source solutions, including Linux web hosting, open source content managed websites, and Asterisk voice-over-IP telephony.