"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."