Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) main page.

Note for navigation with support technologies: in this page you find 3 main elements: search engine (shortcut key 1); the highlights at the main area of the page (shortcut key 2) e main menu (shortcut key 3).

Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC)
section: Emerging Technologies
Home > Emerging Technologies > News > Open Source Software Agreement

Open Source Software Agreement

 - 09/03/2006

At the Forum for the Information Society held in Aveiro on 10th March 2006, Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and the company Sun Microsystems signed a cooperation agreement on making open source software freely available to researchers, professors, students and civil servants conducting any activities related to teaching, research and the development of information technologies.

The rights to the software covered by the agreement are held by SUN Microsystems, who will make the software available for wider use in public interest research and development tasks under very broad terms. Application will be coordinated by UMIC.

The agreement includes making the following available free of charge:

  • Licenses for SUN StarOffice 8 open-source software for word-processing, spread sheets, presentations and databases, with open XML-based file formats, which can be used on various operating systems, including Windows, Solaris for Sparc and Intel, and Linux;
  • the current version of the Java Enterprise System software suite, which includes application web servers, e-mail, agenda, identity management and software development tools;
  • basic StarOffice 8 web training for all users in the group covered by the agreement, and advanced training for a limited number of users with a view to training trainers-;
  • web support methods for StarOffice 8 software which will include answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), Discussion Forums, Sunsolve database searches and patch downloads;
  • OpenOffice.org software, the binary open source version of StarOffice for Windows and Linux operating systems.

SUN Microsystems grew from an initiative of a group of students from Stanford University. Its name comes from Stanford University Network, and it is one of the pioneering bodies in online computing. It is also the source of the Java programming language and platform for online computing, which is used in many different systems.

Last updated ( 19/12/2011 )