Sun plans to give Microsoft a run for its Office money.
Sun Microsystems confirmed Tuesday that it will release StarOffice 6 under the GNU General Public License on October 13. Sun VP Marco Boerries said the date is "set in stone." An announcement is expected Wednesday at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.
Sun is working with Collab.Net to form a community for StarOffice and is purchasing the URL from Caldera Systems. Collab.Net was founded a year ago to create markets for free software and is hosting the community for Sun's Forte for Java Community Edition developer tool, which Sun is in the process of offering under a variant of the Mozilla Public License.
Sun also is creating an independent OpenOffice.org Foundation modeled on the Apache Foundation. Sun is funding the foundation to get it started but will hold a minority position and plans to name other partners soon.
"Getting agreement inside Sun was an endeavour, but what I wanted to achieve was creating an open alternative to Microsoft Office, and that is bigger than GPLing the source code," Boerries said. "In my discussions with customers and communities and governments it became clear that for this project GPL was the right license, and it proves that Sun is an innovative and fast-moving company in doing the right thing."
Microsoft's fourth quarter earnings on Tuesday may have given comfort to any nervous Sun executives. Even though Microsoft beat analysts' expectations its growth is slowing. Revenue for the productivity and tools group that includes Microsoft Office fell 9.9 percent, from US$2.94 billion to US$2.63 billion, from a year ago. Sun, by contrast, has been giving away StarOffice since it bought the company last year.
Collab.Net will coordinate the StarOffice community, which will specify XML file formats and language-independent Application Programming Interfaces. It also will provide filters to read and write Microsoft Office files. Sun expects to ship bindings for C, C++, Perl, Python, Java and Visual Basic for StarOffice on Windows.
Boerries said allowing developers to use multiple languages will help drive acceptance of StarOffice. Sun is retaining the StarOffice brand and will ship an implementation based on the OpenOffice.org source tree. Sun also will ship StarPortal, a hosted version of StarOffice due later this year that will be based on the same source tree.
Commercial companies nervous about using free software can license StarOffice under the Sun Industry Standard Source License, which allows proprietary extensions to the source code but has stricter compatibility requirements. OpenOffice.org will provide the required compatibility tests.
The only parts of StarOffice Sun cannot release are intellectual property owned by third parties, and it is counting on the community to supply the needed features. These include linguistic functionality, hyphenation, spell-checking, dictionary, and file filters from vendors such as Adobe, Lotus and Corel.
Reaction to Sun's plans so far has been positive. Developers have complained about StarOffice's slow performance and kludgy user interface, but say an OpenOffice.org community could fix those problems fairly quickly. Sun claims the backing of all 10 Linux vendors that have signed distribution agreements for StarOffice 5.2.
Opening StarOffice code also may help Sun broaden its partnerships. Allegrix CEO Chris Clabaugh said he tried several months ago to develop a relationship with Sun on StarOffice but Sun did not seem interested, despite the fact that Allegrix had Web-enabled StarOffice through its own infrastructure two days after Sun bought it. Allegrix is an ASP start-up working with SCO's Tarantella and currently is focusing its development efforts on Windows 2000.
