The release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 represents two years' of development and a major milestone for open-source developers worldwide. Two of the project's leaders have previously commented on the new release in exclusive interviews with Enterprise Open Source Magazine.

Now, BEA VP Bill Roth who was with Sun Microsystems in the early days of "OOo," offers his exclusive comments as well. Asked about what the team's original vision for OOo was, and how far he thinks that vision has come, Roth told us, "In my view, OOo is the second most successful open source project on the planet, short of Linux itself."

"It's great software, and it does something everyone needs. Our original goal was to make it the Desktop version of Linux, and in a way, it has become that. OOo was miraculous in many ways. First, we at Sun underestimated the response. When we released it, our site melted down from all the download attempts.

"Second, we did not anticipate the rapidity with which the community would be able to use it. We got an email 21 hours after we released it that someone in Long Beach, CA, and done a successful port to FreeBSD, a platform we did not even support.

"The other major area of serendipity was localization. Once we release the localization framework, people in other countries were able to localize it into all sorts of languages. I remember that the localization into Hungarian happened over a weekend by 4 grad students. And because of the foresight of the OOo engineering team, they had great support for bi-directional languages and multi-byte ones as well, like Thai and Hebrew. OOo really has the ability to take over the world."