“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.”