Jul 19: Sun Microsystems Inc, the owner of the free StarOffice suite of programmes that competes with Microsoft Corp's Office programmes, plans to make the source for StarOffice public, in an effort to give the fledgling programme a boost with software developers. StarOffice, which was developed by Marco Boerries and his Star Division company that was later bought by Sun for $74 million in stock, has been gaining in popularity recently. It includes word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, Web publishing, e-mail scheduling and other functions that can work on a variety of operating systems, including Windows."We don't want to make this a Sun only play," said Boerries, now vice-president and general manager of Webtop and application software at Sun, said in an interview. "Over the next three years we'll have a similar impact on the office-suite market as Linux did to the operating system market."
Linux is the free, upstart operating system that is gaining favour among thousands of software developers and, slowly, within big companies as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Boerries said that the code will be posted at www.openoffice.org on Oct 13, because the open-source code is based on StarOffice 6.0, the next-generation version of the programmes that will replace StarOffice 5.2.
Boerries said that in the past ten months, there have been about 15 million copies of StarOffice distributed, about three million of which have been downloaded from Sun Microsystems's Website. The rest have been distributed through Linux software companies and computer makers.
Open source software, which includes Linux, has been gaining momentum in the past two years, potentially posing an eventual threat to Microsoft, which has about 90 per cent of the world market share for operating systems and nearly as large a share of the so-called office productivity software market.
-- Reuters
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