OpenOffice achieved a historical milestone by reaching more than 100 million downloads, according to a Sun employee. OpenOffice is an office suite based on StarOffice, it is available for free download ever since Sun acquired Star Division Corporation of Fremont, California in August 1999. 100 million downloads is a great achievement for this product. Apparently, users will likely to make OpenOffice adoption decisions based on factors such as software savings, application compatibility, and the built-in with Linux operating system (OS) when users switch to Linux OS. However, the 100 million downloads will definitely boost the customer confidence when they want a side-by-side comparison with other office suite applications in the market.

An open source project OpenSolaris that sponsored by Sun Microsystems has opened another new portal which is in Russian language today. OpenSolaris is a project that founded in early 2004 with the aim to create a strong Web community that love, promote and advocate the Solaris operating system (OS) throughout the world. Most of the people that sign-up to this community are those that have been interacted with Solaris OS at some stage before, and with this amount of people that Sun believed the Solaris OS can be enhanced and strengthened in term of functionality. It is due to the fact that the future releases of the Solaris OS will be built from the source code that have been tested, maintained and improved from the people of this OpenSolaris project.

Today OpenSolaris has more than 12,000 members and most of them are not the employee of Sun Microsystems and in the meantime, they have a lot of activities going on. As mentioned earlier, today they have opened the Russian portal. They also named the OpenSolaris Day in this coming September 11 and the event will be held in Boston.

The Russian portal is the latest country portal that found on OpenSolaris project site. There are twelve (12) different country portals in total that include Brazil, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Poland, Spain besides Russia.

The other day I came across an article that entitled a former executive of MSN has joined Mozilla’s Chinese subsidiary, Mozilla Online, as its chairman and CEO. Li Gong, the new Chairman and CEO left MSN China on December 4 last year, was a key man in several companies include Sun and MSN China. Other than this, he also holds a first degree, and Master at Tsinghua University and a PhD holder at Cambridge University. Prior to joining Mozilla, he was a visiting professor at Stanford and Cornell University and as a member of the editor committee of IEEE Internet Computing and ACM TISSEC, according to this article (in Mandarin).

However, Li Gong explained his role at Mozilla is to set up a new company, i.e. Beijing Mou-Zhi Network Technologies Ltd. 谋智网络技术有限公司 in this July.

…..increasing adoption of the Firefox browser and other relevant products and technologies in China, building local developer and user communities, developing local partnerships, and participating in and helping to advance the state of art of open source software in China.

Nevertheless, there will be no such “Firefox China” to be launched, according to a news (in Mandarin) in China.