Fwd: [announce] OPENOFFICE.ORG COMMUNITY ANNOUNCES OPENOFFICE.ORG 1.O: FREE OFFICE

Wed May 1 21:23:01 EEST 2002

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: [announce] OPENOFFICE.ORG COMMUNITY ANNOUNCES OPENOFFICE.ORG 1.O: 
FREE OFFICE
Date: Wed, 01 May 2002 05:30:35 -0700
From: Zaheda Bhorat <Zaheda.Bhorat at Sun.com>
To: announce at openoffice.org, discuss at openoffice.org, 
dev at marketing.openoffice.org

OPENOFFICE.ORG COMMUNITY ANNOUNCES OPENOFFICE.ORG 1.O: FREE OFFICE
PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE

Global Community Builds Full-Featured Office Suite With Revolutionary
Momentum

May 1, 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.

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.

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-- 
I.Ioannou <roryt at roryt.gr>