IBM Joins OpenOffice.org Community

The OpenOffice.org community announced that IBM will be joining the community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software.

IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite’s software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products.

IBM has been a major supporter of the Open Document Format (ODF) which originated at OpenOffice.org, but hadn’t yet taken the plunge to help out with the development.

“This is great news for the tens of millions of users of OpenOffice.org and the thousands of individual members of the community”, said John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead. “We welcome IBM’s contributions to further enhancing the OpenOffice.org product. But equally important is IBM’s future commitment to package and distribute new works that leverage OpenOffice.org technology supporting the ISO OpenDocument Format standard. ODF is a once in a generation opportunity for the IT industry to unify round a standard, and deliver lasting benefit to all users of desktop technology.”

Hope with IBM’s involvement, OpenOffice reach greater heights.

Last month Google has officially begun distributing office suite and Microsoft Office competitor Sun StarOffice as part of the Google Pack. The proprietary office suite StarOffice is based on the same code base as Open Office.

OpenOffice download.