Hasta La Gadget!

Well, the OpenOfficeMouse rightly caused a bit of skepticism when it was officially announced earlier this week, and it turns out it is something non-involved after all — just not the way you might think. Yes, the multi-buttoned mouse is still all too real (in prototype form, at least), and supposedly set for a release… sometime, but it seems that mouse’s creator got a bit ahead of himself in slapping the OpenOffice name on it. As it happens, the mouse was apparently officially presented at the recent OOoConference in Italy to judge the reaction from the OpenOffice community, but the relationship ended there, and the mouse’s creator was never given permission to market the mouse with the OpenOffice name (probably a wise move). Not one to be deterred, WarMouse now seems to simply be referring to the mouse as the OOMouse — don’t worry though, you can still call it “ugly.”

Update: The OOMouse creators have contacted us to give their side of the story, claiming that they have emails granting permission to use OpenOffice.org’s logo. In their words, “Due to the massive confusion about OpenOffice.org producing the mouse and the numerous questions about the mouse working with programs other than OpenOffice.org, we have mutually agreed with Sun to change the name of the mouse and cease using the OpenOffice.org logo.”