OStatic

Was it you? Someone out there was the one hundred millionth person to download the popular open source word processing suite OpenOffice.org 3.0 yesterday, just in time for a celebration at the community's annual conference in Orvieto, Italy next week.

The milestone took just over one year to achieve once OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released October 13, 2008. The project followed up with three subsequent point releases and version 3.2 is scheduled to appear in December.

If part of your workflow involves a lot of cutting and pasting, then you know how limiting the native clipboard feature is on your desktop no matter which platform you're using. If you want to add a little extra awesome to your cutting and pasting routine, then have a look at this roundup of clipboard tools that make the job go just a little easier.

Glipper - This clipboard manager for the GNOME panel. It keeps a history of copied text so you can refer back to it later. Glipper has support for Actions, Snippets, No-Paste services, and more. It's available in English, German, and Italian.

CodeWeavers, the software vendor whose product line allows users to run Microsoft applications on Linux and Mac operating systems, has announced the one-day Lame Duck Anniversary Sale. In honor of the one-year anniversary of last year's popular free giveaway, new customers and returning customers half off everything in its store, including product renewals.

Billed as a 24-hour non-giveaway, customer have until midnight CST tonight, to make a purchase at a 50% discount. Any purchases made today will also include the upcoming release of CrossOver (code-named Snow Mallard ), along with 2-for-1 support days until its release. That is, if you purchase today, and we ship Snow Mallard a month from now, we'll retroactively add two months of support to your account when Snow Mallard comes out, and you'll get it for free, the CodeWeavers team announced in an email to customers. As an additional incentive to buy today, 25 random customers will receive lifetime support contracts as well.

In typical hilarious fashion, CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White issued a press release outlining his reasons for not giving away his products for free again this year. His tongue-in-cheek explanation is that the 650,000 licenses he gave away last year nearly sent the company into a financial tailspin and left his sales director a shattered mess. My socialist phase has passed, says White. I?m back to being a greedy capitalist.

Open source word processing program AbiWord has a new release this week that sports several new features and a slew of bugfixes. AbiWord, long overshadowed by OpenOffice.org, is a fine multi-platform application in its own right and the new goodies in version 2.8.0 bring even more to the table.

These days, collaboration is king and AbiWord 2.8.0's new collaborative capabilities are pretty spiffy. Now, when multiple authors edit the same document, AbiWord can tell the writers apart. Each author's text appears in a different color, making it easy to distinguish who's writing what. Collaboration is even easier now, thanks to the new Web service, AbiCollab, which lets users store and share documents online.

Though it's easy enough to change your browser's language to Spanish, using a browser that's customized specifically for a Hispanic audience is even better. The folks behind Flock, the Mozilla-based social Web-browser, have teamed up with Spanish-language media company Univision to develop the an exclusive edition of the browser that will provide content aimed specifically at Hispanic audiences.

The folks at open source collaboration platform MindTouch conducted a poll recently to get a sense of who open source executives think are the most influential people in the industry. More than 50 execs were polled from Europe and North America and no one was allowed to vote for anyone in their own company. The results were ranked according to the effect each nominee has on the open source industry, and some of the winners may surprise you.

Silicon Florist blogger Rick Turoczy is reporting that the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2010 is returning to Portland, OR next year. Organizers moved this year's event to San Jose to San Jose, CA and by the time the conference was over, they were already telling attendees OSCON 2010 would most likely be held once again in Portland.

Organizers claimed the move to San Jose was prompted by the high cost of travel to Portland and its cramped convention facilities. The reasons for moving back to Portland for OSCON 2010 are much more elusive, but Portland's mayor confirmed it has signed a contract to play host next year.

If your blogging platform of choice is WordPress, then you've no doubt noticed recent improvements to the way it catches spelling, style, and grammatical errors. That's thanks to acquisition of After the Deadline, a language checking software package designed for WordPress and TinyMCE.

The plugin's creator, Raphael Mudge, announced today that he has released the source code for After the Deadline (AtD) under the GNU General Public License. We?re also announcing a jQuery API for After the Deadline. Now you can add an AtD check to a DIV or TEXTAREA with little effort, writes Mudge. This is the same API that powers the Intense Debate plugin I wrote about recently.

Pidgin is a great GTK2-based instant messenger application that supports a bevy of protocols, including ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber, and AIM. It's a terrific app in its own right, but when you add some of these power tools, Pidgin is even better.

pidgin-hotkeys - Use this plugin to assign global hotkeys to quickly perform regular tasks like fetching messages, toggling the buddy list, or opening the preferences pane. Also available in German and Swedish.

Many people use the open source application Tor on the desktop for anonymous browsing sessions. Thanks to a grant from the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge and the team behind The Guardian Project, now Android mobile phone owners can use Tor to browse privately on their handheld devices, too.

We have successfully ported the native C Tor app to Android and built an Android application bundle that installs, runs and provides the glue needed to make it useful to end users?. secure, anonymous access to the web via Tor on Android is now a reality, writes Guardian Project team member Nathan Freitas.