[ Thanks to Tim
Hanson for this link. ]
“Sun Microsystems Inc. said it will announce on Tuesday that it
is buying Star Division Corp., developer of an office application
suite that competes with Microsoft Corp. , as Sun seeks to move
office applications beyond the personal computer.”
“With the acquisition of Star Division, Sun will offer computer
users Star’s office productivity tools over the Internet, for free,
or for sale on a low-cost compact disk, continuing Star’s current
distribution model.”
“Sun said that it also plans to make the source code of
StarOffice available over the Internet for free, making StarOffice
a part of the open source community, where software and its
code is given away over the Internet and programmers can update and
improve the code.
“Besides Windows and Linux, StarOffice also runs on Sun’s
Solaris operating system and on International Business Machines
Corp.’s OS/2.”