Symphony, the Lotus productivity package (word prossessing, spreadheets, presentations) has been around a while. I used a DOS version of it - at least of the word processing and spreadsheet parts - in the early 80's. Eventually it was, of course, eclipsed by Microsoft Office (wasn't everything?) but it never entirely went away. Its latest incarnation is as a free download from IBM that runs in Windows XP or Vista and in Linux. The download is labeled beta so I imagine it may still have a few kinks in it but I have a copy on the way right now: We'll see.
IBM's web site proclaims support for Mac OS X is underway. As Mac ports of this sort of thing tend to take time I'm not holding my breath. But credible versions of the OpenOffice.org suite (one running in X11, one in Java) are available for the Mac (and versions are there for Windows and Linux as well) and Apple's own iWork productivity package (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) is excellent, so there are plenty of office software options to go around.
This is good news for several reasons, not the least of which is that it could save a whole lot of people a whole lot of cash. I'm still trying to decipher the most recent Office update but I'll be fooling around with Symphony soon too. We'll see how it works.
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