“This week Sun Microsystems finally lifted the lid on the source
code to their office suite, StarOffice. Weighing in at over 9
million lines of code, the release classes as the biggest ever gift
of code to the community by a corporation, and fulfills the wishes
of thousands of developers worldwide, who have been clambering to
get their mitts on StarOffice.“
“What should you know about the release?”
“1. StarOffice has been renamed OpenOffice, (in a rather obvious
and rather clichéd attempt to woo the open source developers
who have made projects such and Linux, GNOME and KDE possible), and
will be run as an open source project under the GNU General Public
Licence through OpenOffice.org.”
“2. It’s heavy. Not only does the release weigh in at 9 million
lines of code, but according to Sun officials, much of that code is
uncommented and undocumented. Some of the comments are in German
(get out that Babelfish, people!), and from my experience coding,
most of them are bound to be cryptic….”