OpenOffice kicks off developer drive

The OpenOffice.org project has launched a developer documentation contest in an effort to boost interest in the suite. 

Developers are asked to write articles about topics such as porting the productivity suite to new platforms, new features such as wizards or chart types, and bug fixes.

It is hoped that increasing the amount of documentation will help the project identify new functionalities and directions for the suite.

"Documentation is a door opener to people. Even if it's not read very much, producing documentation helps because it helps clear your thoughts. But we assume that people will be reading it," project leader Louis Suarez-Potts told vnunet.com.

Individuals or teams can win a $750 cash price every month for the next six months, and this could be extended to a period of 12 months. The first submission deadline is 28 February.

OpenOffice is a suite of productivity tools for text editing, spreadsheets and drawing. Sun Microsystems acquired the product in 1999 and released the source code in 2000 under an open source licence.

Sun uses the code as the foundation for StarOffice, a commercial version of the suite. IBM sells an OpenOffice derivative as part of its WorkSpace suite, a group of applications built on top of Lotus.

OpenOffice is maintained by a group of around 600 developers. Sun is the largest contributor with about 100 of its employees working on the suite. Other supporters include Novell, Red Hat and a number of individual developers.