Despite recent articles claiming that a Sun-Google hosted desktop productivity suite and common operating system, ” is way off base,” word comes today that Google plans to hire programmers to improve OpenOffice.org, the Sun developed Microsoft Office counterpart.
It sounds like a typical tentative first-step for Google. From the News.com article:
“We want to hire a couple of folks to help make OpenOffice better,” DiBona said.
Google has shown an affinity for open-source software, which are programs developed in the open and available for free. Many of the company’s programmers came of age in the open-source era, so advancing the open-source agenda comes naturally, DiBona said. But the company also has business reasons to justify its open-source embrace.
“We use a fair amount of open-source software at Google. We want to make sure that’s a healthy community. And we want to make sure open source preserves competitiveness within the industry,” he said.