I’d like to take this opportunity to give thanks and praise to a very special open source project – the KOffice project.
KOffice turned 1.5 earlier this month and the release boasts a slew of improvements and new features. I’ve been using KOffice on and off for years now and I can tell you it’s really starting to deliver its full potential. It’s always been very fast and quite usable, however, a few buggy releases resulting in spontaneous crashes made me a bit wary about using it for my articles. But now with 1.5 looking and feeling polished as ever, I’ve already used KWord for at least one article, and this blog, BTW 
Version 1.5 also includes an improvement resulting from one of my bug reports – yay! In late October last year I submitted this bug report:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115362
which identified a crash with the spreadsheet application, KSpread, when spelling was checked with an open cell. The bug was confirmed about three weeks later and within 90 minutes of confirmation it was fixed!
That’s the genius of open source development – any idiot journalist like me can come along out of nowhere and make a positive contribution to an application used by many people all around the world. And the fact that KOffice accepts bug reports from anyone without any bullshit contributor politics will undoubtedly help it move ahead in leaps and bounds compared with other office suites, be they open source or not. There’s no reason why KOffice can’t become the premier open source office suite for Linux and other Unixes.
Keep up the good work!
Rodney
