GNU Chess is playing at level about 2400-2500 ELO. Which is only the level of the average grandmaster . The strongest engines passed the 3000 ELO. I think Rybka now plays at level about 3100 ELO. So to speak... GNU Chess is not among the strongests chess engines but it's surely a strong free engine.

I'm also Ubuntu fan. It's well known that MS Office is selling the windows. All the business uses MS Office. And unfortunately MS Office is better than OpenOffice. Personally I don't care about Office Suits. I'm with OOffice. But people are used to MS Office and it has some unique features that are not available in OOffice. If you make OOffice better than MS Office -- you'll make linux the first choice OS! And probably a lot of money ;-)

The only problem would be converting the masses. Don't get me wrong, the OOfice team has done a great job and I use their suite for work - just upgraded to 3.0 today. However, Microsoft's Office Suite has given them the competitive edge that keeps their OS on top. I'm still debating on whether or not the open-source app Evolution competes with Outlook as an email client and calender. If only we could start a movement...

I hear what you're saying, but there's of course, many mail clients to choose from (like Thunderbird)...and let's not forget all the web-based mail like Google and Yahoo, which any OS can make use of.

As for Open Office, if most computer users knew about it (there's a Windows version), I think Microsoft would panic.  In fact, they got in legal hot water trying to stifle Open Office earlier this year!

As far as starting a movement - I think the ball's rolling....

I should have mentioned Thunderbird. I made use of it for a while with a calendar plug-in before I pushed it all to Gmail. Talk about a great web-based email client. My company was actually discussing switching the administrative group to Gmail as a flexible email client for a while. They're still stuck with Outlook for now.

And don't forget those Gmail docs!

(and Reader, and Clalendar, etc.....)

Google quite possibly will rule us all one day with their docs and giant spiders.