Sun will offer back-line support for OpenOffice
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Sun plans to announce on Monday that it will provide support for the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, citing a wave of momentum behind the open-source project.The support, which starts at $20 per user per year, will be offered to companies that distribute OpenOffice.org, not directly to end-users, according to Mark Herring, senior director of marketing for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org and Network.com. &quot;For a lot of distributors, they wanted to distribute OpenOffice.org and had no option for back-line support,&quot; he said.OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, Sun&#39;s accompanying commercial product, are compatible with Microsoft Office and identical in terms of capabilities, which include word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software. But until now, Sun only supported StarOffice.Another difference will remain -- Sun does not plan to provide indemnification against lawsuits for OpenOffice.org, as it does for StarOffice, Herring said.Sun&#39;s move comes as OpenOffice.org is being downloaded 1 million times per week with total downloads to date standing at about 110 million, Herring said.Out of that number, Sun estimates that &quot;tens of millions&quot; of people are actively using the software, according to Herring. The most recent version is 2.3. Version 2.4 is expected in March and will contain significant new features, according to the openoffice.org Web site.&quot;Microsoft Office is still the dominant tool out there -- only a fool would deny that,&quot; he said. &quot;But [OpenOffice.org] has had a huge amount of momentum.&quot;Sun believes the average OpenOffice.org user skews younger on average and that download activity in Europe and the U.S. has been greater than in Asian countries, he added.Developers can create extensions to the core OpenOffice.org suite. Sun has made a new one for shaving down the size of presentation files, Herring said. The wizard-like tool goes through a file and asks users whether they want to keep or compress the various elements, he said.Sun plans to provide support for any extensions it creates, according to Herring. As for ones made by third parties, &quot;we would have to work with them on that code on a case-by-case basis,&quot; he said.Sun is also releasing StarOffice 8 Server. Herring described it as a conversion engine that changes 40 document types into PDF files. The server, which costs $11,000, is aimed at enterprises with large stores of legacy documents that aren&#39;t archived with an open standard, according to Herring.
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Hewlett-Packard&#39;s new OpenView software is designed to help companies automate IT responses to business events, such as a jump in order-processing transactions.
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At yesterday&#39;s official launch of the new Solaris 10 operating system in San Jose, Calif., Sun executives said Solaris will be issued next January under an &quot;open-source&quot; licensing plan similar to that used by the rival operating system Linux and the
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Sun Microsystems anounced Wednesday that it is preparing to release a plug-in for its StarOffice 8 productivity suite that will provide two-way conversion between the OpenDocument format and Microsoft Office 2003.
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Former rivals Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have been working together to make their products more compatible -- permitting Windows to run on Sun&#39;s hardware and making StarOffice and Java Runtime Environment compatible with XP SP2.
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Sun is moving to a two-tier development environment in which corporate customers can get the commercial version of Solaris and developers can access the binary version.
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Sun is getting into the open-source business with Solaris, but will this automatically translate into better sales?
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Sun Microsystems has decided to offer support for the OpenOffice.org suite, charging $20 per user per year to companies that distribute the open-source software.
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IBM is hoping to provide commercial-level technical support to developers building applications using Eclipse open-source tools.
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Blog: Support for Acrobat and Reader has arrived for Microsoft Vista and Office 2007.
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Sun Microsystems hopes to make MySQL's open-source database more attractive to enterprise customers. But some existing MySQL users say Sun has a lot of work ahead of it.
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One of the major contributors to the leading open source alternative to the Microsoft Office Suite announced early this morning it will be offering additions to OpenOffice enabling it to support Office 2007's new XML-based Office Open XML format.
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(InfoWorld) - When Massachusetts' government decided to use Open Document Format (ODF) as the default document file format throughout its agencies, a key concern was that ODF would not allow the visually impaired to use assistive computer technologies. On Wednesday, IBM Corp. said it has helped solve that problem by developing technology that will allow applications based on ODF to better communicate with products used by the blind to access visual information on computer screens. Through Project Missouri, IBM developed application programming interfaces, (APIs) collectively called iAccessible2. These APIs will make it easy for visuals in applications based on ODF and other Web technologies to be interpreted by screen readers that reproduce that information verbally, IBM said. IBM spokesman Ari Fishkind said that in the past it has been hard for screen-reading technology to keep up with the advent of cutting-edge development and file formats such as ODF, AJAX (asynchronous Javascript and XML) and DHTML (dynamic hypertext markup language). The latter two technologies allow increasingly complex visuals to be rendered in Web browsers, and those are difficult to translate for screen readers, he said. iAccessible2 not only will help ODF communicate better with screen readers that assist blind computer users, but it will also allow charts, pictures and other visuals based on AJAX and DHTML to be discerned by the visually impaired through those readers. "It's like a universal decoder ring," he said of iAccessible2. The technology is based on interfaces IBM originally developed with Sun Microsystems Inc. to make programs on Java and Linux platforms accessible to the blind. IBM has donated its work in Project Missouri -- so named because Missouri is called the "Show Me" state -- to the Free Standards Group, a nonprofit group that promotes open-source software. That organization will work on the technology and maintain it as an open standard so anyone can use it, IBM said. Other companies working on the development of iAccessible2 include Sun, Oracle Corp. and SAP AG. Mozilla Corp. also intends to integrate iAccessible2 into its open-source Firefox Web browser, Fishkind added. ODF has been approved as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and is currently in competition with Microsoft's Open XML file format to become the industry's default file format for documents. Open XML is the basis of Microsoft's proprietary Office 2007 productivity suite that also recently was approved by the ISO as a standard. Companies such as IBM, Sun and others are promoting the use of ODF against Microsoft's technology, while others will support both ODF and Open XML just to be on the safe side, in case both are widely adopted. The rivalry between ODF and Open XML heated up last year when Massachusetts put forth a proposal to change its default file format to ODF for all of its state agencies, which would mean they would have to stop using Microsoft Office. This eventually led Microsoft to submit Open XML as a standard as ODF was already going through that process. Increasingly, government agencies are moving their IT platforms to technologies that are considered standard throughout the industry, forgoing some technologies that are seen as proprietary.
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Sun Microsystems and Microsoft next month plan to reveal the work they have been doing to make their products interoperable, a Sun executive said yesterday.
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Sun Microsystems plans to unveil the latest version of its flagship Solaris operating system and offer a free version of the program to make it more attractive to corporate and academic computer users.
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The Japanese government has approved Sun Microsystems&#39; open-source desktop software for use within one of its ministries, Sun is expected to announce.
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Maker of the WordPerfect word processor and productivity suite will support Microsoft's Office Open XML, OpenDocument format.