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Source: Thomas Billert (thomas@billert.de)
Moderator: Trevor Smith (trevor@haligonian.com)
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I received a reply to my recent WarpCast message
(http://www.os2ss.com/warpcast/wc4868.html) about Sun not to produce
a StarOffice 5.2 for OS/2 (which was essentially only the translation
of an article of a German computer news service). Alexander Wagner
(a.wagner@teamos2.de) spoke to a guy from Sun at CeBIT and here's
what he wrote me (and allowed me to send to WarpCast, because the Sun
guy even encouraged him to spread this information, to prevent Sun
from being bombed by letters and e-mails from angry OS/2 users):

  "Yesterday I was at the fair and talked to a Sun employee, who's
  mainly responsible for all the OS/2 stuff they do.

  He told me that Sun really wants to open StarOffice's source. From
  what he said this is supposed to happen shortly after version 5.2
  is released, this means very soon. Sun is really interested in
  continuing especially the OS/2 port by Netlabs to ensure further
  development of StarOffice. In the beginning this will perhaps
  happen as Closed Source, before StarOffice's source is opened, so
  that developers from Netlabs will get the source even earlier than
  the rest of the world. He is very committed himself and is
  interested to manage this quickly and he said that there are
  already negotiations with Netlabs.

  So why doesn't Sun publish a version 5.2 for OS/2? He clearly
  stated that this is a problem of not enough manpower at Sun. Sun
  really has problems getting enough developers, and they have a lot
  of plans with StarOffice. They do ports for a number of platforms
  and they also work on StarPortal, which is (from what the Sun guy
  said) also supposed to run on OS/2 (and every problem they get with
  Netscape 4.61 and Java and cannot be solved by Sun goes directly to
  the OS/2 development department at IBM (yes, it still seems to
  exist ;-) )). He said that for a complete OS/2 port Sun really
  lacks developers. 

  The lack of manpower results mainly from the fact that Sun has to
  re-invent the wheel for a lot of things on OS/2, because OS/2
  terribly lacks quality development tools "You know which company
  released a version 4.0 compiler in the state of a 1.0 version?".

  But he also said that he and a number of other people of the team
  are very committed to keep StarOffice for OS/2 alive. "People even
  work at home in their leisure time to solve the problems." But
  these version cannot be published by Sun officially, they have to
  come from the OS/2 community. He's very convinced that this plan
  will work. On the question: "Well, when you do it clean enough we
  can send version 5.2 through Odin.", he responded that this would
  be an option, but he and a number of other people would prefer a
  native version, and that he is convinced that this will be done. In
  his opinion OS/2 will be the first platform to get an Open Source
  StarOffice."
 
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