Sun and Redflag Chinese 2000 to Collaborate on OpenOffice.org Projects

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), the OpenOffice.org community and Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Co, Ltd., today announced a joint development effort that will focus on integrating new features in the Chinese localization of OpenOffice.org, as well as quality assurance and work on the core applications. Additionally, Redflag Chinese 2000 made public its commitment to the global OpenOffice.org community stating it would strengthen its support of the development of the world’s leading free and open source productivity suite.


Under the provisions of the agreement, Beijing Redflag Chinese 2000, which produces the popular OpenOffice.org-based RedOffice, will add to the open source project approximately 50 engineers, some of whom have been working on the OpenOffice.org project since the second half of 2006.

In a signing ceremony at the First International OpenOffice.org Summit, in Beijing, China, HU CaiYong, CEO of Redflag Chinese 2000, stated, “I look forward to the innovative and new accomplishments our collaboration will produce. I view this ceremony as saying Hello! from China to the community. There is much to learn -- for everyone. And much to gain.”

Sun Microsystems, Inc., the primary sponsor and contributor to the OpenOffice.org project, will assist Redflag Chinese 2000 in its engineering efforts. Redflag Chinese 2000 joins Novell, Intel, Red Hat, Good-Day, Inc., of Japan, and many others in developing OpenOffice.org.

“We are glad to welcome Redflag Chinese 2000 to partner with us on OpenOffice.org, the world’s leading free productivity suite and community,” said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software, Sun Microsystems. “Redflag’s dedication and commitment to OpenOffice.org further strengthens the community and enhances the product with Chinese localization, quality assurance, and core productivity applications.”

OpenOffice.org is a key implementation of OpenDocument Format (ODF), the ISO 26300 open standard file format for office applications that is completely vendor neutral. The increasing number of OpenOffice.org contributors continues to strengthen the position of ODF, which is currently supported by a wide range of applications, including OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, KOffice, IBM Workplace, Google Apps as well as Microsoft Office and FireFox via plug-ins. ODF implementations are available for all major operating system platforms including the Solaris OS, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2, FreeBSD and Symbian OS.

OpenOffice.org continues to prove its popularity. The project estimates that there are several million users of the free productivity suite worldwide, and they use it in more than 100 languages and on every key platform. Since OpenOffice.org 2.2 was released in late March, there have been more than 2.7 million downloads from the OpenOffice.org Web site and most of these have been of the Windows version, making it the world’s leading freely available productivity suite.

About Redflag Chinese 2000

The Beijing Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Co., Ltd., which was established in Dec.2000, is a high-tech software subsidiary company of Chinese Academy of Science(ISCAS), and its main shareholders are the SINO-I Technology Limited and ISCAS. The company provides Chinese office software service mainly to Enterprises and government institutions, and devotes itself to the development of promoting OpenOffice.org in China for the long term. The Beijing Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Co., Ltd. has developed the first global Chinese Office Suite “RedOffice” based on OpenOffice.org. For more information visit: http://www.ch2000.com.cn/english/index.htm

About OpenOffice.org

The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, support and promote the leading open source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org’s leading edge software technology (UNO) is also available for developers, systems integrators, etc to use in OpenOffice.org extensions or in their own applications.

OpenOffice.org supports the OpenDocument Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as well as legacy industry file formats and is available on major computing platforms in more than 90 languages. OpenOffice.org software is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) and may be used free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial.

The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a number of companies, including Sun Microsystems, the founding sponsor and primary contributor. StarOffice and in Asia, StarSuite software are Sun’s professional distribution of OpenOffice.org.



About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
A singular vision -- “The Network Is The Computer” -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world’s most important markets. Sun’s philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.