[plug] OpenOffice.org 1.0 Launch

[Jacqueline McNally]

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