Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 4.12
OpenOffice.org is an open-source office application suite that competes
with the commercial product Microsoft Office.
(Screenshot from OpenOffice.org, a registered
trademark of Apache Software Foundation. Copyright © 2012 by Apache Software Foundation.
Reprinted with permission.)
.
OpenOffice.org is an office application suite supporting word processing, spread-
sheets, databases, and presentations (Figure 4.12).
.
Perl is the most popular Web programming language.
.
Other popular open-source programming languages and tools are Python, Ruby,
TCL/TK, PHP, and Zope.
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Programmers have long recognized the high quality of the GNU compilers for C,
C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada.
Surveys indicate that the quality and dependability of open-source software is about the
same as the quality of commercial software [130].
The GNU Project and Linux are important success stories in the history of the open-
source movement. (GNU is pronounced “guh-new” with the accent on the second sylla-
ble. It's a tradition among hackers to invent recursive acronyms; GNU stands for “GNU's
Not Unix.”) Richard Stallman began the GNU Project in 1984. The goal of the project
was ambitious: to develop a complete Unix-like operating system consisting entirely of
open-source software.
