"No matter what the cynics say," wrote Sun president and COO Joanthan Schwartz in his blog this week, "since its inception, Sun has been a believer in and contributor to open source communities - after all, we were built on an open source operating system. Open source is in our blood, not just our press releases and billboards."

The occasion for these comments? The fourth "birthday" of OpenOffice.org.

"Congratulations, folks," Schwartz continued, "No one can possibly doubt that we're making a difference."

Schwartz noted that, in the four years since Sun's contribution of StarOffice to the open source community, it has been downloaded tens of millions of times, and the European Union has recently recommended OpenOffice.org as the basis for standard file formats and document interchange.

"Chalk one up for open standards," Schwartz noted. "The competition's on the run."

It was "one of the single largest open sourcing efforts in the history of the industry," Schwartz added.

"Granted, I haven't done a line count in a while," hew wrote, "but it's a massive codebase, managed and evolved by a global community of folks interested in enhancing, evolving, innovating and localizing the fastest growing office productivity suite on the market. Millions of lines of code managed by a global team, committed to affordability, universal access, and security."

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