FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Brett Smith
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
(408) 276-6143
Erin Geisler
Citigate Cunningham for Sun
(512) 652-2713
egeisler@citigatecunningham.com
OPENOFFICE.ORG COMMUNITY ANNOUNCES OPENOFFICE.ORG 1.O: FREE OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE
Global Community Builds Full-Featured Office Suite With Revolutionary Momentum
April 30, 2002 - The OpenOffice.org community (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 [tm] 6.0 software is – like StarOffice 6.0 software – a full-featured office suite that provides a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org 1.0 offers software freedom, enabling a free market for service and support, while the Sun-branded product, StarOffice 6.0 software, offers 24x7 fee-based support and training for consumers and businesses, along with deployment and migration services. StarOffice software 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 software, 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 software, to work seamlessly in the application. The OpenOffice.org 1.0 software runs stably and natively on multiple platforms, including Linux, PPC Linux, Solaris [tm], Windows and many other flavors 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 software 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 localization, 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 centralized 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.”
About
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org is the home of the open source
project and its community of developers, users and marketers
responsible for the on-going development of the OpenOffice.org 1.0
product. The mission of OpenOffice.org is to create, as a community,
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. Additional
ports, such as FreeBSD, IRIX and Mac OS X are in various stages of
completion by developers and end-users in the OpenOffice.org
community. OpenOffice.org 1.0 is written in C++ and has documented
API's licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and
Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) open source licenses.
About CollabNet
CollabNet provides companies with solutions for collaborative
software development by combining a Web-based software application
with a suite of consulting services. Using these solutions, customers
can collaborate on development projects within an enterprise, with
customers, business partners, or with third party developer
organizations, such as industry specific or open source communities.
CollabNet enables corporations to reduce costs and increase revenues
by bringing different project team members together, regardless of
their location. CollabNet is currently working with customers ranging
from hardware and software providers to companies from industries
such as financial services, wireless, and pharmaceuticals. Brian
Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, established
CollabNet in July 1999. For more information, see
http://www.collab.net
About Sun
Microsystems, Inc.
Since
its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The
Computer[tm]" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:
SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength
hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be
found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at
http://sun.com.
© 2002 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, StarOffice, Solaris and "The Network Is The Computer" are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
