Thanks, and happy 2008

Thanks to Italian journalists, who have written around 2.000 articles about OpenOffice.org in 2007 and have made the Italian version of the suite the most "wanted" on Google. If you compare OpenOffice.org with Microsoft Office using Google Trends you can see the results here: http://www.google.com/trends?q=openoffice%2C+microsoft+office (don’t forget to select "Italy" to see what happens at local level). Thanks to all the Italians (1.788.076) who have downloaded OpenOffice.org in their own linguistic version, to those that haven’t downloaded it becuse it was already inside their Linux distro (around 300.000), to those that have installed it from a covermount CD of a trade magazine, and to those – italians and foreigners – that have downloaded OpenOffice.org in English (for a personal choice) or in another linguistic version, from the French, German and Slovenian – official languages of the Italian republic – to the mother tongue for all the immigrants (OpenOffice.org can be used in the mother tongue version by 95% of the world population, a key advantage over all the other office suite). Thanks also to all the people that have bought Microsoft Office 2007, because they have pushed the community of volunteers beyond their limits. Today, no one in Italy – with the exception of a few fanatics – can consider OpenOffice.org as a niche fenomenon, and this is reflected in the increasing number of enterprises, organizations, families and individuals that every day migrate – alone or with the help of a consultant – to the free office suite. They enter a new dimension, where they are not tied to the strategies of a single company – which may decide, out of the blue, to stop supporting the file format of their documents – but are protected by a community based on the freedom of software and formats. Associazione PLIO wishes to all of you a happy 2008, the year of OpenOffice.org 3.0.