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.

In a year that's been pretty rough on commercial conferences, community run events like FOSDEM, SCALE, SouthEast LinuxFest, LinuxFest Northwest and this past weekend's Ontario GNU Linux Fest are thriving. Why is that? Community conferences win out for a number of reasons.

Attending conferences is a big part of my job, and over the years I've started to take note of what events are worth attending and which events aren't. By and large, it's the smaller community events that are worth your time and money.

Open source, features to drive smartphone market. In-Stat sees 412 million smartphones by 2014, with open source playing a big role.

PortableApps adds non-open source apps, sort of. Freeware makes its way into the suite, which won four of SourceForge's recent Community Choice awards.

Can open source software save democracy? Mitch Kapor delivers open source voting system software.

Will OpenSolaris survive Oracle? With Oracle preparing to take over Sun, we should consider the fate of the OS.

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.