A friend of mine who regularly comments on my blog, often stirring the pot with statements to make us think about what we are writing about, mentioned to me in an email about what the consequences would be if microsoft were to go Open Source.

AbiWord has been my favorite open source word processor for a long time, and it's now out in a new version 2.6.5, which adds some excellent features. If you haven't used this application (for Windows or Linux) before, definitely download it, and if you already use it, go for the upgrade.

OpenOffice.org is the darling of the FOSS office suites, and it is a nice suite. It's cross-platform, and OpenOffice.org Writer is a first-rate word processor with a lot of advanced features. But it's not the only good option for Linux users: Abiword and KWord are excellent lightweight word processors with good feature sets, and both are licensed under the GPL. All three are wonderful. In this two-part series we're going to dig into KWord 1.6, and mine some of its hidden jewels.

Not long ago, I was talking with a friend of mine who works at VMware, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based irtualization software giant. Many people, even very technology-savvy folks, don't realize how big and powerful VMware really is. This is a software company with a market capitalization of nearly $23 billion, and its market cap was larger than that not long ago.

As word processors for Linux keep picking up in popularity, household names in the computer industry are getting into the act. Like Sun Microsystems, Novell and IBM Lotus are both offering word processors based on OpenOffice.org's open source Writer application, but none of these offerings is exactly alike.

Matt Hartley at Datamation recently suggested promoting open source adoption -- using a very different venue. He suggests mall kiosks as a potentially effective way to spread the word about open source software, and how it can work for the average computer user.

OpenOffice.org isn't the only game in town for open source word processing. One of the best, and underexposed, open word processors is AbiWord.

Ever used OpenOffice? I remember submitting a document once using the open format, only to find that the person I sent it to could not open it in Microsoft Word.

OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source open software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers.

You can adjust openoffice to your needs by adding more functionality with the help of extensions.