By Stevie Smith Sep 11, 2007, 11:53 GMT
Multinational computer technology company IBM (International Business Machines) has this week revealed that it is joining the wealth of supporters already attributed to the growing OpenOffice.org community. The New York-based company will now provide code development and engineering support for OpenOffice, which is a free software suite alternative to Microsoft’s popular proprietary Office package.
IBM is to also offer Sun Microsystems’ OpenOffice.org technology across its own product line, while initial code contributions – including accessibility enhancements – will be made available that have been developed internally as part of the company’s Lotus Notes product.
"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, Project Lead of Marketing at OpenOffice.org. "We welcome IBM’s contributions to further enhancing the OpenOffice.org product."
McCreesh went on to say that IBM considers it to be equally important to "package and distribute new works that leverage OpenOffice.org technology supporting the ISO OpenDocument Format standard," with ODF providing the entire IT industry with the opportunity to "unify round a standard, and deliver lasting benefit to all users of desktop technology."
Founded by Sun Microsystems in 2000, the open-source OpenOffice software package has been downloaded close to 100 million times, while thousands of developers continue to volunteer their contributions to its ongoing development.
Capable of running on all major platforms including Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X, OpenOffice is available in more than 100 different languages, is fully interoperable with other leading software suites, and is also completely free to use. The OpenOffice suite includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, database, and other modules.
"In the seven years since Sun founded the project, OpenOffice.org has fueled and filled the need for document data and productivity tools that are open and free… We look forward to working with IBM and the other members of OpenOffice.org to ensure that this momentum continues," commented Rich Green, Executive Vice President of Software at Sun Microsystems. "We invite others to join us in the community and participate in building the future as OpenOffice.org and ODF continue to gain popularity across the planet."
Your Talkback on this Story