Santa Clara, CA — (press release excerpt) — The OpenOffice.org community 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 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 24×7 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, 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.

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.

 
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