It’s official: Sun will be open sourcing StarOffice 6.0 on October 13th, 2000 according to an article in Yahoo News business section. Sun Vice President Marco Boerries is quoted as saying

Sun’s open-sourcing of StarOffice Suite is the single largest open-source software contribution in GPL history and it adds a
key application suite to the open source portfolio,

Many other luminaries including Miguel Icaza of Gnome fame and Andy Hertzfeld are quoted. At the time of this writing, a Front Page article on Linux Weekly News has in depth coverage of why this is important.

By open sourcing StarOffice, Sun opens the door for any developer to modify, extend or fix problems in the actual program instructions of StarOffice. This should lead to rapid improvement and adoption of this already excellent Office software suite.

With this move, Sun hopes to break the lock that Microsoft currently has on Office suite software.