October 31st, 2005
Googlers want to slim down OpenOffice
News.com’s Stephen Shankland has a story today about Google throwing some bodies at OpenOffice, as it does for other open source projects that it uses, such as Apache Axis Web services. Chris DiBona, Google’s manager for open-source programs, said the programmers would working on cutting the memory requirements and download size of OpenOffice. These are major problems, as George Ou has pointed out, calling OpenOffice a memory and resource hog. But having a few Googlers work on OpenOffice, as others do on Linux, Firefox and other open source software, doesn’t make a Googleized, Web-based Office. Perhaps, like I suspect Microsoft will do, Google will build all kinds of widgets that work with a slimed down OpenOffice…
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
