On November 30, November 1, Google announced that it had hired program developers to further improve the performance of OpenOffice.org to demonstrate its close connection with open source. OpenOffice is a suite of StarOffice products of Sun. Five years ago, Sun put his copyright software into the open-source program. Recently, OpenOffice's challenges to Microsoft Office have only moved into Google
On November 30, November 1, Google announced that it had hired program developers to further improve the performance of OpenOffice.org to demonstrate its close connection with open source.
OpenOffice is a suite of StarOffice products of Sun. Five years ago, Sun put his copyright software into the open-source program. Recently, OpenOffice's challenges to Microsoft Office have become more apparent. ChrisDiBona, head of Google's open-source program, believes that it can help OpenOffice improve performance and reduce its memory requirements by at least 80 MB.
"We are going to hire multiple developers to further improve the performance of OpenOffice," he said ". This indicates that Google should further closely cooperate with open source. He pointed out that many Google programmers were born in the open-source era, so it is natural to support open-source plans. Of course, Google also has commercial considerations for supporting open-source products.
The supervisor said: "We are using a lot of open-source products in our company. we want to prove that this is a healthy development community. I believe that open-source can effectively protect competition in the industry ." In early October this year, Google and Sun announced a partnership to jointly develop several software programs, but did not disclose details.
Speaking of cooperation in OpenOffice, Google CEO Schmidt said that adding powerful search capabilities can make OpenOffice more attractive. Like other partners, OpenOffice directly challenges Microsoft Office software. This does not seem to attract enough attention in the industry.
As the most important company in the industry, Google's joint effort to develop OpenOffice with Sun has also attracted attention in the industry. There are also many reasons for people to give up Microsoft's Office and use OpenOffice. for example, OpenOffice.org 2.0 was just launched, with a modern interface and new features. It supports open documentation.
DiBona does not address Google's investment opportunities and scale in non-copyright software. The industry believes that Google will eventually take further measures. That is, it will purchase technology rather than internal support, Red Hat CTO Brian Steven s said, many customers have their own Linux version before seeking Red Hat technical support. Currently, Google uses open-source technologies such as the Python programming language and MySQL database program. In addition, Google's blog website also uses the ApacheWeb server software and Tomcat software package.
In addition, GCC assembly software widely used in the industry is also adopted by Google. Google is not only an open-source software consumer, but also a producer of open-source software. For example, Google employees are allowed to develop Apache Axis Web Engineering and GAIM timely communication software. Google also launched several open-source projects, including debugging software tools, monitoring MySQL databases, and using AJAX software to enrich Web interfaces. Of course, there are also obvious limitations on Google's open source, and it has not received external code donations.