The OpenOffice Project has posted the first beta of OpenOffice 2.0, an open source office suite for Linux and Windows that saves all its files as zipped XML. New features in 2.0 include a multipane view, custom shapes, enhanced database frontend, mail merge wizard, nested tables, digital signatures, XForms, and the ability to open and save WordPerfect files. OpenOffice is dual licensed under the LGPL and Sun Industry Standards Source License.
I'm pretty down on OpenOffice these days. I used the 1.0 version to write Effective XML, which was a poor choice that probably cost me months. I should have used Word. Microsoft Word is not a paragon of usability, but it's functional, which is more than I've ever been able to say for OpenOffice. In fact, OpenOffice invented whole new categories of "GUI Bloopers", preeminent among them, "Don't add a menu item for functionality you know doesn't work, just because you expect to get around to it sometime in the next couple of years." 1.1 was a slight improvement, but only slight. It fixed the most glaring and obvious bugs, but still didn't produce a product that allowed a writer to simply write without thinking about the interface, something Word does fairly well. OpenOffice might be a reasonable alternative for someone who uses their word processor infrequently enough that they're willing to put up with some pain in order to save a few bucks. However, it's clearly inadequate for those of us who write for a living.
2.0 might be an improvement, but I don't know. These days I've almost completely retired my Linux and Windows systems in favor of a Mac. There's no Mac version of 2.0, and after years of telling Mac developers not to bother porting 1.x because 2.0 was going to be so much better, the development team has realized they have no plan at all for ever running on the Mac. OpenOffice needs to learn the VRML lesson: you can't take over the world if you can't run on a Mac.
From the browser that wouldn't die department, AOL has posted the first beta of Netscape 8. This is basically just a repackaged, reskinned Firefox 1.0, security flaws and all. It does have the unique feature of allowing you to switch between the Gecko and IE rendering engines. Most users should stick to Firefox 1.0.1 or Mozilla.