WarMouse Meta Rises From The Ashes Of OpenOfficeMouse

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The OpenOffice Mouse was a hideous 18-button white mouse that was designed by ‘the open source’ community and was endorsed by the OpenOffice.org people behind the great free open-source office suite. After some backlash over the circa-1993 design and some legal questions involving the OpenOffice name, the 18-button mouse has resurfaced as the WarMouse Meta, and with a redesign.

This little mouse has been down a long path. Originally designed by the OpenOffice community for the hardcore OpenOffice user, the mouse was to be produced by WarMouse. When pictures of the mouse hit the internet, the look of the device was almost universally unpopular (“I thought this was a Photoshop joke.” one blog commentator said regarding the original pictures).

After pictures of the mouse came out, a legal controversy came out when OpenOffice took league action against WarMouse, saying that they never gave permission to use their name (despite WarMouse providing archived e-mails to the contrary). WarMouse has now decided to launch the mouse without the OpenOffice namesake, instead calling it the OpenOffice Meta, and redesigning the bland white mouse to a black and red or black and blue color schemes.

WarMouse will reveal more information about the mouse at CES next month, but the specs of the OpenOffice mouse were impressive, 512MB of on-board flash memory (for saving your user profiles from computer to computer), 1,600 CPI resolution, default control profiles for popular programs, etc. The original price for the device was quoted at $75.