Google to help build OpenOffice

Giant Google is set to send some of their minds over to the OpenOffice development team to assist in the production of the suite. A while back we heard about Google and Sun teaming up to improve some of their products, and though details were sketchy, this apparently was one of the targets. OO has received a lot more attention as of late, and with the bitter rivalry growing between Google and Microsoft, it makes sense that Google would want to help Sun. That may not be the absolute reason, of course, because strong development of OO and OSS is in Google's best interest as the company makes heavy use of open source software.

"We use a fair amount of open-source software at Google. We want to make sure that's a healthy community. And we want to make sure open source preserves competitiveness within the industry,"
Having viable market alternatives is always a good thing. As it stands, OO is powerful but lacks much of what Microsoft Office can offer. Perhaps with Google's support, we'll see OO 3.0 sooner than expected with a lot of more features.