Today, the Release Candidate 4 is available. If all goes well, this is the last RC before 3.0 comes out.

OpenOffice.org is the Golden Acorn Award winner for the month of October, awarded by FreeFunFiles.com!

My colleague Kay Koll found this interesting study: "The open source productivity suite OpenOffice has been found on 45% of the Linux and Windows machines scanned for the ongoing survey. However, deployment of OpenOffice (73%) is much greater among participants' personal computers than in the businesses where they work", acknowledged Kim Weins, OpenLogic's VP of sales and marketing, in an interview with BetaNews.

Information Week published an article about the same study.

The study itself is also available.

OpenOffice.org, the Region Ile de France, Silicon Sentier and Sun Microsystems invite you to celebrate the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 and the 8th Anniversary of the OOo Project. A party will take place on the 13th of October in Paris, France, at the Region Ile de France's Main Hall.

More information and registration link here: http://fr.openoffice.org/launch3

Today, OpenOffice.org 3.0 RC3 is available. If all goes well, this will be the final RC before the planned product release, so stay tuned!

Yesterday, OpenOffice.org received a Lutèce d'Or! This award was given to Charles Schulz from OpenOffice.org by the Minister Eric Besson (in charge with prospective, public policies and digital economy development). Congratulations to the French native-lang project for their great efforts and achievements!

Now it can't be long until OOo 3.0 is available. Today, the release candidate 2 was made available!

Many people have been asking when OpenOffice.org 3.0 will be available, and what the reasons for the delay are.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is a major release with lots of changes not only in the visible part of the program, but also in the code. Projects of this size require lots of testing, especially in the last phase of the release. Our beta versions and release candidates have been downloaded by tens of thousands of interested people which have given us great feedback that will be incorporated.

We expect to have OpenOffice.org 3.0 to be available at approximately the end of September, with a second release candidate being available in the next few days. We want to make OpenOffice.org 3.0 the best office suite ever, and we're confident that everyone will be excited with what we call "the year of 3"!

Open Source is not only a model of licensing and a model of software development, but it also is about enabling people from all over the world to take part in todays information society, no matter what their financial situation is. So, eventually, open source is also about humanity. Out of this reason, I'd like to introduce to our fellow blog readers a service that also works on a charitable basis: aGoodCause.com

aGoodCause is a partnership between 700 of the world's most important NGOs - charities like Save the Children, Red Cross, Amnesty International, OXFAM and many others. Their idea is to support animal welfare, human rights, fighting poverty and climate protection. They do this by enabling online shoppers all over the world to support their favourite charity, when they shop online. Read more on their website!

The release candidate 1 of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now ready for testing. This test release is made available to allow a broad user base to test and evaluate the next major version of OpenOffice.org, but is not recommended for production use at this stage. If you are a regular user of OpenOffice.org, here's a great opportunity to help us make the next release the best ever. Download this release from our download page.

My colleague Alexandro Colorado writes: The site from the Ranger police have the statement of OpenOffice.org right on their homepage althought in Spanish, they state the succesful migration and adoption of modern technology with the goal of make their processes more efficient. Site: http://www.policiacaminera.gov.py

Registration for the Native-Lang Confederation meeting in preparation of OOoCon 2008 is now open!

Kay Koll writes about a temporary internship Sun is offering for interested parties. "You will design, creation and publication of video pod casts, does market research and analysis competitive products."

OpenOffice.org will exhibit at the Systems trade show in Munich, which takes place from October 21th to 24th, one month after the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0. If you are offering products, services or software related to OpenOffice.org, you are welcome to co-exhibit with us at our booth. Booth management, organization and marketing will be done by the association OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. More details via e-mail at floeff@openoffice.org or in German at http://www.ooodev.org/termine/aktuelle_termine/vorplanung_systems_2008_2.html

I'd like to announce the winner of the splash screen poll. We had a total of 789 votes, which is a quite good count! The winner is

Jacek Adamkiewicz: Proposal 3

with a total of 83 votes. You see that this result means that voting was quite tight and all proposals have seen nearly equal acceptance throughout the community.

I'd like to take the opportunity and thank all contributors for their great efforts! I hope that contributors whose proposal have not been chosen will support us in designing in the future nontheless!

Its just been made official that the State of Pahang is migrating all its productivity suites to OpenOffice.org. Read more about this here.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 will get a new splash screen to reflect our new and fresh release, and the community has the final word on it. Several great proposals have been sent in, and we ask all community members to cast their vote. Together with the splash screen, two other design elements will be included, namely the Windows installer graphic, and the about box image.

Voting will end on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 12:00 UTC+1. Every OpenOffice.org community member can vote, and voting is absolutely anonymous.

TO VOTE, PLEASE VISIT THE FOLLOWING WEBSITE:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/splashvote/

Should you have questions or issues with the voting system, please write to surveys@marketing.openoffice.org

OpenOffice.org has today opened registration for its biggest ever annual international conference. The Conference - to be held in Beijing, China between 5th.-7th. November - is the main event of the year for developers, supporters, and users of OpenOffice.org software, the leading free software alternative to Microsoft Office. Read more at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/08/prweb1177594.htm

OpenOffice.org was awarded three prizes in the SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards! Thanks to all our users for their votes!

Matt Asay writes about "the curious (mis)perception of open-source support", an article that's definitively worth reading. Thanks to Jane for pointing this out!