On Dec. 28 we reported that Sun’s StarOffice product is tentatively slated to come to the Mac platform, in version 5.2, by next summer.
All of Sun’s work to date can be freely downloaded as part of the open source effort at openoffice.org. According to sources, Sun has its goodies in the “Aqua” platform folder(s) and is currently working on getting the built-in graphics libraries that are part of StarOffice working under OS X.
“It’s a real chore since StarOffice has its own virtual windowing/event model mechanism that we have to somehow fit inside/under/around the OS X/aqua windowing/event model,” says one source.
StarOffice is a downloadable cross-platform office productivity suite that includes components for word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail, graphics, Web publishing, scheduling, database, and management applications.
In October, Sun released the source code for the StarOffice suite, opening the way for possible development for the Mac under OS X by others. The reason for the open-source, according to the company, is to follow its core principles to develop and support open standards and compete on implementations. Other reasons include the development of a higher quality product as more development means fewer bugs and new features coming faster to market, as more programmers would be working on the product.