This week the Big Blue IBM has released an open source software, more specifically, an office suite that carry the name of Lotus Symphony. The program file is big, weighs in at approx. 133MB, and registration is required for the users to proceed with this download. This Lotus Symphony is a free software that allowed us to create and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations on Windows and Linux platform. It is built based on the OpenOffice, another well-known open source office suite and Eclipse, an open source development framework and is meant to straddle the fence by keeping not only its existing IBM customers happy, but with a grander ambition to rival the Microsoft Office. Besides, this Lotus Symphony promotes the use of Open Document for XML (ODF), an XML-based standard for documents approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). While, it is relatively new in the market since it has just been launched in a week, the response for this free software is too good, and I was told that the Lotus Symphony was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release.

No doubt, IBM was busying improve the features of this Lotus Symphony but the ongoing challenges for this software is big on another front. People nowadays see Microsoft Office as a standard in performing office productivity tasks. For Apple lovers, Lotus Symphony currently did not support the Macintosh environment, this product won’t come close to Microsoft Office in this coming one or two years.