Star Office to become Open Source?

kwelty wrote in to tell us that this morning's Wall Street Journal has a bit more about Sun buying Star Office. The crazier bit tho (and the bit for while there currently is no URL following: "Sun, of Palo Alto, Calif., plans to make the Star Office applications available via the Internet and may give away the program's underlying source code free as well, these people said." Cross your fingers.

Comments

This would certainly be a good move on Sun's part

[bgarrett]

Given their questionable involvement in the open-source effect, this would give them the chance to release something to the OSS community that doesn't really bite into their core business (which right now appears to be selling servers and Java-related stuff). And there's every chance that an open-source StarOffice could integrate with an open-source Mozilla, providing the free counterpoint to Office/IE.

Sun saves on developers and time (unless they just intended to buy it and let it stagnate); they get brownie points with the free-software geeks; they get a competing office product that's already nicely cross-platform.