Sun to auction "branding space" in OpenOffice

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 14 Nov 2008 at 07:50

Sun is holding an auction that will allow companies to buy branding space in the OpenOffice suite.

The open-source equivalent to Microsoft Office is supported by Sun, but CEO Jonathan Schwartz says there's an opportunity to bring more money into the project.

"An auction's afoot to see who we'll be partnering with us to integrate their businesses and brands into our binary product distribution," Schwartz writes on his blog.

And he hints at some of the ways the "branding" might appear in the office suite. "The possibilities are limitless: people tend to print those documents, fax them, copy them, project them," he says.

Schwartz acknowledges that the move could prove unpopular with OpenOffice users and contributors. "I know this annoys my friends in the free software community, but branding allows us to invest more in [the] OO.o community and features, from which everyone benefits," he argues.

The Sun CEO says OpenOffice was downloaded three million times last week, and that he expects that level of interest to increase as individuals and companies begin belt tightening. "Downloads are accelerating, giving us a reachable user base we estimate to be between 150,000,000 and 200,000,000 users - a global recession will amplify OpenOffice adoption," Schwartz claims.

Earlier this week, Sun's proprietary version of OpenOffice, Star Office, was dropped from the Google Pack without explanation.