After an agreement with Sun Microsystems earlier this month to promote one another"s software, Google has announced plans to hire programmers to improve Open Office. The open-source office suite, which has its roots in Sun"s proprietary StarOffice package, has seen much greater exposure since the deal with Google. Now Chris DiBona, Google"s manager of open-source programs, believes that with a bit of help they can improve upon Open Office"s shortcomings, such as high memory requirements and 80MB download size.
Open Office 2.0 was released on October 20th. Nearly 50 million copies of the software have been downloaded since the project"s inception nearly five years ago.