Bristol Switches to StarOffice

Ultimately, the council decided to move over to Sun's StarOffice suite. Based on the open source OpenOffice.org suite, StarOffice provides a complete, supported, cross-platform office solution. Although StarOffice itself is not available under the same Open source license as its OpenOffice.org brethren, the move to StarOffice signaled a key win for open source supporters. StarOffice not only opens the door to open source, but it also firmly closes the door to the dreaded vendor lock-in that plagues its closed source counterparts. This vendor lock-in is evident in closed source file formats (such as those of Word and Excel) and would help to keep the user base locked into those applications to continue to be able to open the files. StarOffice and OpenOffice.org's support for the OASIS-standardized Open Document Format (ODF) and adoption of that software in Bristol eliminates vendor lock-in