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Along with an email client and a web browser, an office suite is a core essential application that almost every computer user requires. Although there is a dominant commercial product in this category, its price, along with its closed-source nature, makes it an unsatisfactory option for many. Apache OpenOffice ®OpenOffice®, for over two decades, has helped fill this gap. Our goal is to develop, publish, and support OpenOffice free for anyone to use, and since it is open source, free for anyone to build upon.

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There are over 6,000 languages in the world, but unless the language is associated with a G20 economic superpower, commercial vendors tend to ignore it. The OpenOffice community has a long-standing tradition of supporting numerous languages, including ones used by smaller populations, minority languages, endangered languages, etc. For example, South Africa has 10 official languages other than English. OpenOffice has been translated to all of them. By supporting these languages that would not otherwise be supported, we help reduce “digital exclusion” and promote development, local education and administration. It is not easy to keep the translation up-to-date for all languages, but thanks to volunteers we can reach this goal.

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Community-led development “The Apache Way”

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) provides a foundation for open, collaborative software development projects by supplying hardware, communication, and business infrastructure. Each project is independent in the development of their software within the ASF guidelines and is governed by a Project Management Committee (PMC) that is composed of committers to the project.

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