This text is written in English language, using a Western text input method. The text is written horizontally from left to right. This seems to be so normal. It seems to be the only right way to write text. Or not?
No. I suppose that a majority of the educated inhabitants of this planet do not write in English, and they do not use any of the Western scripts. Instead, they may be used to write in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean glyphs (CJK), or in other writing systems that are called "complex text layout languages" (CTL) by the "normal text layout" users.
Let's have a short look into Wikipedia: There are different writing systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system
There are many of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_systems
You can easily get lost just by browsing those Wikipedia topics and the direct links.
So, back to OpenOffice.org. I once blogged about the many languages of OOo. In the meantime, the OOo web page that lists all the OOo languages moved to the Wiki: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Languages
Most of the current developers of OOo are living and working in countries where English language and Western script is not seen as exotic. The download numbers show that most of the current users also live there. But we do not want to exclude anyone from using OOo just because of other languages.
There is quite a long way to go for OOo to really fit the needs of all possible users in all countries of the world. The good news is that we are on our way.
The native language projects cannot be praised enough. Many volunteers offer so many hours of work and enthusiasm. Sometimes a whole language project seems to be run by only one person - and successfully!
Any user can contribute to improving their version of OOo over time. Submit issues or help resolving the issues. Provide documentation in your language. Currently, a spotlight is directed at the Arabic versions, see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Arabization_efforts for a list of work in progress.
The real problems using alien versions of OOo are often unknown to the developers until they are reported by alien users. For example, OOo can be used to write text from right to left since many years. But only now we know that it can be a problem to embed the numbers that can be seen on Egypt car plates (they are called Western Arabic numbers) into Arabic text. The formatting automatism tends to embed those numbers as those 1234567890 numbers that are often called Arabic numbers, without the "Western". This design flaw will be fixed soon.
Another issue that came to our knowledge is that after changing the locale for your OOo Calc, you would also need to change the date and time formatting strings. For example, German users would like to use TT.MM.JJJJ (Tag, Monat, Jahr) as a format string instead of MM.DD.YYYY (Month, Day, Year) when they format the output of a Calc date function. This was possible all the time, but it was never documented because no one complained until now. The localized help would give the localized formatting code, but never a list of all the codes for all locales. (You can find the raw data at http://l10n.openoffice.org/source/browse/l10n/i18npool/source/localedata/data/ )
So we all can and will learn new things every day with OOo.