[Reader-list] Open-Source Office Productivity Software

[Kanti Kumar]

Dear friends,

For your information.

Kanti Kumar

-----Original Message-----
From: 	owner-gkd at phoenix.edc.org [mailto:owner-gkd at phoenix.edc.org]  On
Behalf Of Jacqueline McNally
Sent:	Wednesday, May 01, 2002 08:30
To:	gkd at phoenix.edc.org
Subject:	[GKD] ANN: Open-Source Office Productivity Software

OpenOffice.org
MEDIA RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
OPENOFFICE.ORG COMMUNITY ANNOUNCES OPENOFFICE.ORG 1.O:
FREE OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE
Global Community builds full-featured office suite with revolutionary
momentum
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
24x7 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.
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 organisations, 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
ComputerTM"-has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW) to its
position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and
services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to take their
businesses to the nth. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on
the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com/.

MEDIA RELEASE CONTACT:
Jacqueline McNally
Community Contact, Australia/New Zealand
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project
Jacqueline McNally
+61 8 9474 3021 (GMT +0800)
tsukusenai at openoffice.org



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