About one week after IBM joined the Open Office project, Big Blue is releasing its own free office package. The office software, dubbed Lotus Symphony is based on Open Office.

Version 2.3 of the popular Open Office suite was released today. Downloads are already available on many mirror servers.

Open Office development will benefit from IBM's own development activities.

When the Singapore Airlines Airbus A380 takes off for its maiden flight October 25, it will have a complete Linux client/server system on board.

Projity, the company behind the free OpenProj software reports more than 25,000 downloads of the project software within the first week after the release.

The Google software package now contains a free version of Sun's StarOffice, the commercial variant of the free OpenOffice.org office software.

IBM has now released the new version of the Lotus Notes Groupware and Collaboration Suite for Linux servers. Besides numerous enhancements and a new, Java-based architecture, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 now provides a Linux distribution-based platform for the server.

Following Firefox and Thunderbird, a known URL security bug was closed in the Seamonkey browser suite in August. A similar bug has now been found in Konqueror.