Open Office 3.0 was officially launched Monday but the demand for the open-source word
processing program promptly crashed
OpenOffice.org's servers.
OpenOffice.org acknowledged the server crash with a brief note posted on its Website.
"Apologies—our Web site is struggling to cope with the unprecedented demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org. The technical teams are trying to come up with a solution. Thank you for your patience."
Open Office competes with Microsoft Word, and the upgrades between Open Office 2.0 and 3.0 are noticeable. Compatibility between Office 2007/2008 has improved, allowing open-source advocates who work in a Word office to more easily share files.
Open Office 3.0's out-of-the-box functionality also enables users to immediatelyread documents saved in the .docx, .xlsx or .pptx formats.
Open Office 3.0 users can still expect to be confronted with a very large installer for the program. For Windows machines, the installer is about 130 MB; Mac users can look forward to a 160-MB installer.
Open-source enthusiasts who were stonewalled from downloading the program due to high server utilization should continue trying to download it. However, there has been no update on when OpenOffice.org's servers are expected to be back online.
