Open Office coming to Beijing

At the last Beijing Linux User Group meeting, a member announced that Louis Suarez-Potts, the OpenOffice.org community manager, would be visiting Beijing in April. Large-scale projects, such as Open Office are in dire need to make an imprint on China. For one, China needs to be more active in the development of productivity applications, such as Open Office. The global proliferation of Open Office is essential to competing with Microsoft. To ignore China is like avoiding one third of the world. Granted the majority of that third can read English, you still don’t want to leave any excuses to not go open source, especially when products like Open Office don't require the user to switch their OS.

The second reason why open source projects, outside of distros, need to start making in roads into China is that they can be the force that brings more contributors out of the woodwork in China. With such a massive programming pool, large projects like Open Office, can draw out more programmers to grand stand their talent, stand up and be recognized and attract more programmers to the 'cause'.

Mr. Suarez-Potts is scheduled to be in Beijing between 12th and 20th of May. It appears the principle reason for the trip is to speak at Beijing University. I hope to get more details on this trip soon, as I would like to confirm if what I suggest is the actual reason. If Mr. Potts is here for any other reason, I would like to impress upon him my two goals for his visit. I can assure the confirmation of this trip will be posted on www.beijinglug.org as soon as a confirmation can be made.