"Neither Lotus nor Novell are strangers to word processing, of course. But with IBM Lotus Symphony and Novell office suites, the vendors have made their first forays into Linux word processors, a space also occupied by dozens of rivals, ranging from Sun to large numbers of small .orgs. In the same general vein as StarOffice, Sun's commercial edition of OpenOffice.org, Lotus' and Novell's suites for Linux and other operating systems feature word processing solutions based on OpenOffice.org's Writer.
"If you're interested in OpenOffice, why bother to use a big vendor's rendition when the community edition is so readily available, both over the Web and bundled with netbooks? Well, Novell's version of OpenOffice--available for Linux as part of SuSE Linux and on a standalone basis for Windows--contains features not built into the community edition. In line with Novell's multi-year interoperability deal with Microsoft, many of these capabilities are geared to Microsoft Office compatibility."
