Redflag to boost OpenOffice.org development

Redflag Chinese 2000, software subsidiary of the Chinese Academy of Science, have announced a joint engineering agreement with Sun Microsystems to enhance Red Office. Red Office is the Chinese language version of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite.

The joint development effort, announced at the First International OpenOffice.org Summit in Beijing earlier this month, comprises the integration of new localized features into RedOffice as well as additional work on the core elements and quality assurance.

Additionally, Redflag will commit roughly 50 engineers to OpenOffice.org, some of whom have already been working on the project since last year. Sun, key sponsor of OpenOffice.org, will assist with the engineering effort.

Malte Timmermann, a technical architect for Sun’s OpenOffice.org team, says on his blog that OpenOffice.org “really needs more people contributing to the application code,” and that the OpenOffice.org team “will make sure to give our new colleges from Redflag Chinese 2000 all support they need to understand the different code modules, and will give advise and support on implementing the different things they plan to do.”

OpenOffice.org, the leading OS-agnostic open source business productivity suite, is compatible with all major commercial office suites. It is freely available in a wide range of languages.

Shirl Kennedy is the senior editor of theDocuTickerandResourceShelfweblogs as well as the “Internet Waves” columnist forInformation Today. She has been writing about technology since 1992.