IBM, And The FREE Symphony!

At last, after a long wait, IBM has come out with Symphony, a “enterprise-grade”suite that will compete with Microsoft Office, and most importantly, it is free.

The suite consist of three applications namely Documents, Spreadsheet and Presentation, which will function similar to Microsoft’s Words, Excel and PowerPoint. It is capable to run on Windows XP and Vista, some Linux platforms, with “support for Apple Macintosh in the pipe line.” Symphony will support Open Document Format (ODF) and PDF, and Microsoft native file format but be warned that not all Office-created documents will open flawlessly.

IBM is offering Symphony in beta version so the community could suggest improvement for the software, thus allowing the suite to evolve faster. Symphony is presented on the new web site, and it is ready for downloading too.

More details on this news can be found on this sites, Ars Technica, Yahoo and Infoworld

Hey, hey, it's a free world.