OpenOffice released 1.0 today. It looks substantially improved over StarOffice 5.2 -- fast startup and no funky desktop. I'm proud to say I helped in my own way.
I didn't code, but nearly two years ago while I was working at CollabNet, it was my job to fly to Germany and prepare the Sun engineers for "going open". They have more than a hundred engineers and engineering managers on the project in Hamburg, and in small groups I talked with roughly half of them. (Each was supposed to teach a buddy.)
The engineers were supportive of the open source move. They had some justifiable concerns, of course. The project was larger with an older codebase than any open source project that had come before. They knew they had to break new ground and change their way of developing and interacting with users.
I recall some people in management needed convincing things wouldn't fall apart. My own words couldn't convince them. They had to see proof. I'm hoping this 1.0 release, if it's as solid as it's reported to be, will act as that proof.