:Smart Partner: Sun To Open StarOffice Code In October
Smart Partner: Sun To Open StarOffice Code In October Jul 19, 2000, 21 :24 UTC (1 Talkback[s]) (6831 reads) (Other stories by Deborah Gage)
"Sun also is creating an independent OpenOffice.org Foundation modeled on the Apache Foundation.
Sun is funding the foundation to get it started but will hold a minority position and plans to name other
partners soon. "Getting agreement inside Sun was an endeavor, but what I wanted to achieve was
creating an open alternative to Microsoft Office, and that is bigger than GPLing the source code,"
Boerries said. "In my discussions with customers and communities and governments it became clear that
for this project GPL was the right license, and it proves that Sun is an innovative and fast-moving
company in doing the right thing."
"Microsoft's fourth quarter earnings on Tuesday may have given comfort to any nervous Sun executives.
Even though Microsoft beat analysts' expectations its growth is slowing. Revenue for the productivity and
tools group that includes Microsoft Office fell 9.9 percent, from $2.94 billion to $2.63 billion, from a year
ago. Sun, by contrast, has been giving away StarOffice since it bought the company last year."
"Collab.Net will coordinate the StarOffice community, which will specify XML file formats and
language-independent Application Programming Interfaces. It also will provide filters to read and write
Microsoft Office files. Sun expects to ship bindings for C, C++, Perl, Python, Java and Visual Basic for
StarOffice on Windows."
"Boerries said allowing developers to use multiple languages will help drive acceptance of StarOffice. Sun
is retaining the StarOffice brand and will ship an implementation based on the OpenOffice.org source
tree. Sun also will ship StarPortal, a hosted version of StarOffice due later this year that will be based on
the same source tree."
