There’s a Press Release just been released to announce that IBM are joining the OpenOffice.org community:

The OpenOffice.org community today 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.

Why is this important?

1. IBM has supported OpenOffice.org in the past – e.g. sponsoring our annual conference. They are also believed to have used OpenOffice.org code in their products (as they are quite entitled to do under our open-source license). However, now for the first time they are actively contributing code back to the project and committing development resources (around 50 engineers) to work on OpenOffice.org code.
2. IBM are also openly committing to use OpenOffice.org code in their own products, for example to provide OpenDocument Format (ODF) capabilities. This is a big endorsement of the quality of our code and also of our component based architecture (proving OpenOffice.org components are genuinely usable by others).
3. It also marks another milestone in the development of the OpenOffice.org community. Although Sun Microsystems are still our major sponsor by a significant amount, following this announcement there will be more sponsored OpenOffice.org developers outwith Sun than within.
4. Finally, IBM will also immediately contribute code to improve the accessibility of OpenOffice.org. IBM’s iAccessible 2 code is believed to be the first consistent way for IT to easily and inexpensively help those with disabilities take advantage of advanced features found in today’s browsers and software programs.

Let’s hope people think the Press Release was worth those late nights

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 7:14 am and is filed under OpenDocument. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.