Sun Shines Again

Further to my general encomium on Sun, here's more good news:

Sun Microsystems... today announced the upcoming availability of the StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview plug-in application for Microsoft Office 2003. The early access version of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) plug-in, available as a free download, will allow seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Office documents to ODF.

...

The StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview is primarily based on the OpenOffice.org platform, the open-source office productivity suite developed by the OpenOffice.org community including the founder and main contributor Sun Microsystems. Sun offers distributions and configurations of and support for OpenOffice.org under the StarOffice brand. The initial plug-in application will support the conversion of text documents (.doc/.odt) only, but full support of spreadsheet and presentation documents is expected in April. The conversion is absolutely transparent to the user and the additional memory footprint is minimal.

This is particularly welcome since there are already noises that Microsoft's ODF plugin for Word is not as faithful in the translation process as might be desired.

And if that isn't enough, here's news that an OS/2 port of OpenOffice.org 2.0 is nearing completion. What more do you want? (Both via Erwin Tenhumberg.)