The deal, signed May 27 but not announced in the United States until Monday, covers 72 public and parochial school boards in Ontario. All will be licensed to use StarOffice 7, the current version of the package, on all school-owned PCs.
Sun representatives did not disclose financial details, but Ontario school officials have said the cost is "minimal." Under its education and research program, Sun provides copies of StarOffice to qualified academic institutions for the cost of the distribution media.
StarOffice has become one of the leading competitors to Microsoft's dominant Office in the market for productivity software, a category that typically includes word processor and spreadsheet programs.
Sun has scored a number of overseas wins for StarOffice and has made the package an integral part of its Java Desktop System to displace Microsoft on desktop PCs. But StarOffice faces increasing competition from other would-be Microsoft-killers, including OpenOffice, a free open-source package based on an early version of StarOffice.
As far as I know OpenOffice is not "based on an early version of staroffice" - from the OpenOffice FAQ:
" OpenOffice.org is the open source project through which Sun Microsystems has released the technology for the popular StarOffice[tm] Productivity Suite. All of the StarOffice source code is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) as well as the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). Sun is participating as a member of the OpenOffice.org community. OpenOffice.org is being hosted by CollabNet."
StarOffice is just OpenOffice with added features and support from Sun.