Four years is a long time in software development, and the changes between 2000 and 2004 reflect that. In 2000, OpenOffice.org didn't exist -- only StarOffice, a product that Sun Microsystems had bought in 1999 from the German-based StarDivision, and didn't seem to know what to do with it. Today, OpenOffice.org is the source of Sun's version of StarOffice, but very much a project in its own right. Today's OpenOffice.org has features that the code that was open sourced in 2000 didn't, including automatic installation of dictionaries and fonts, PDF export, and the ability to write plug-ins in Java, Python, and several other programming languages.
Louis Suarez-Potts has been community manager of the project since before it was announced. Recently, I talked with him via e-mail about where OpenOffice.org is heading, its relations with the greater open source community, and some of the issues that surround the project in the news.
