“Sun Microsystems is billing it as the biggest project in open
source history. Today… Sun placed all nine million lines of
StarOffice 6 alpha code into open source. … “This will be
programming in the large made public for the first time,” said Bill
Roth, Sun group product manager. “This is nine times the size of
Mozilla.”
“As with just about every commercially backed open source
project these days, there are some caveats for those interested in
the code on Openoffice.org. Not only do interested parties have to
agree to the GNU Public Licence terms, they also must agree to
adhere to the Sun Industry Standard Source Licence (Sissl). Under
the terms of Sissl, licensors must agree to adhere to Sun-specified
application programming interfaces and compatibility tests.”
“Since July, when it announced its intentions to open-source
StarOffice, Sun has worked closely with CollabNet, a company
dedicated to managing collaborative code development efforts. It
has divided the massive StarOffice code base into 75 modules,
grouped into 18 projects… Currently, all 18 projects are headed
by Sun employees, but Roth said Sun is expecting “others in the
community to take over some of them over time. … As part of
Friday’s Openoffice.org announcement, Sun announced that
it is making Extensible Markup Language, or XML, the
default file format for StarOffice, replacing the suite’s
former proprietary binary file format.”