UPDATE: OpenOffice.org Community Announces OpenOffice.org 1.0

[ Thanks to Jacqueline McNally for this
link. ]

Perth, Australia (May 1, 2002) – The OpenOffice.org community
(http://www.openoffice.org/) today announced the availability of
OpenOffice.org 1.0, the open source, multi-platform, multi-lingual
office productivity suite available as a free download at the
OpenOffice.org community website. OpenOffice.org 1.0 is the
culmination of more than 18 months of collaborative effort by
members of the OpenOffice.org community, which is comprised of Sun
employees, volunteer developers, marketers, and end users working
to create an international office suite that will run on all major
platforms.

OpenOffice.org 1.0, which shares the same code base as Sun’s
StarOffice 6.0 is — like StarOffice 6.0 — a full-featured office
suite that provides a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft
Office. OpenOffice.org 1.0 offers consumers and businesses software
freedom, enabling a free market for service and support, while the
Sun-branded product, StarOffice 6.0, offers 24×7 fee-based support
and training for consumers and businesses, along with deployment
and migration services. StarOffice also offers additional features,
such as a database, special fonts and Sun quality and assurance
testing.The two office suites complement each other, meeting the
varying needs of consumers, open source advocates and enterprise
customers.

“OpenOffice.org 1.0 may be the single best hope for consumers
fed-up with Microsoft’s desktop monopoly,” said Eric Raymond,
co-founder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). “With Sun moving to
a full service and support business model for StarOffice, users
around the globe will continue to have a free office productivity
software tool through the OpenOffice.org open source
community.”

The OpenOffice.org 1.0 office suite features key desktop
applications — including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation
and drawing programs — in more than 25 languages. In addition,
OpenOffice.org 1.0 works transparently with a variety of file
formats, enabling users familiar with other office suites, such as
Microsoft Office and StarOffice, to work seamlessly in the
application. The OpenOffice.org 1.0 software runs stably and
natively on multiple platforms, including Linux, PPC Linux,
Solaris, Windows and many other flavours of Unix.

OpenOffice.org is the largest open source project with more than
7.5 million lines of code. To date, more than 4.5 million downloads
of earlier versions of OpenOffice.org 1.0 have taken place. With
the release of the 1.0 version, the OpenOffice.org community
expects that number to grow significantly as businesses and
individuals around the world explore the free alternative to
proprietary office suites.

The OpenOffice.org Community In less than two
years, the OpenOffice.org community has grown to more than 10,000
volunteers, working together to build the leading international
office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide
access to all functionality and data through open-component based
APIs and an XML-based file format. Sun initiated this effort by
donating the StarOffice source code and engineering to the
OpenOffice.org community. One of the major benefits of
community-based development is peer review, which has resulted in a
stable, secure and flexible software package.

Participants in the Community work on projects ranging from code
development to porting and localisation, to bug reporting,
documentation, product marketing, local language sites and mirror
sites for software download.

“There are many important roles that volunteer developers can
play to shape the future functionality of OpenOffice.org (OOo) so
if you are looking for someplace to contribute, OOo can use you,”
said Kevin Hendricks, a key contributor to the OpenOffice.org
community since its inception nearly two years ago. Hendricks has
lead volunteer development teams for both the OpenOffice.org 1.0
spellchecker and PPC Linux port projects.

“When OpenOffice.org was released, it was a tremendous amount of
code with a very deep history, and thus we knew it would take a lot
of time and effort to reach a critical mass of community
participation,” said Brian Behlendorf, CTO and co-founder,
CollabNet. “The project has now attracted a significant amount of
outside involvement, some of it in pretty interesting areas like
marketing and quality assurance. With the release of 1.0, it’s
clear those efforts are bearing real fruit. Congratulations to the
community — and to Sun — for making this happen.”

CollabNet’s SourceCast application enables both centralised and
geographically distributed software development teams to
collaborate on OpenOffice.org projects and to track them
accurately. SourceCast is the premier Web-based collaboration
environment, which includes an integrated set of software
development applications. CollabNet also provides strategic advice
on open source issues and the growth of OpenOffice.org, and offers
analysis on current trends within the community.

“OpenOffice.org may be the most important open source project
right now, said Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME project.
Because people will try it and see they can get everyday work done
without giving more money to Microsoft, they’ll see — in a
low-risk way — that open source software can work for them and be
an even better solution.

OpenOffice.org
Website

OpenOffice.org
1.0

[Due to high traffic at the OOo site, users should try these
mirrors for download. According to OpenOffice.org, only English
language builds are available at this time. -ed]:

HTTP

Americas

San Francisco

New York

Europe

Austria

Belgium

Denmark

Germany
Hungary

Iceland

Italy

Netherlands
1,
2
Spain 1,
2

UK

Australasia

Australia

China (PR)

Indonesia

FTP

Americas

México

Europe

Austria

Belgium

Denmark
Germany
1,
2,
3,
4
Hungary
Hungary

Iceland

Italy

Netherlands

Poland
Spain
1,
2

Sweden

Switzerland

Australasia

Australia

Indonesia