After years of holding out, IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org
open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that
serves as an alternative to Microsoft's Office software. IBM has been
using code from the project in its development of productivity
applications it included in Lotus 8, the latest version of its
collaboration suite, but until now had not been an official member of
the community, said Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for the Lotus
division at IBM. The company now will contribute its own code to the
project and be more visible about its work to integrate OpenOffice.org
into Lotus, he said. Heintzman acknowledged that the International
Organization for Standardization's (ISO's) recent vote to reject
Microsoft's Open XML file format as a technology standard was one
reason IBM decided to join the effort. OpenOffice.org uses ODF (Open
Document Format), a rival file format to Open XML that is already an
ISO technology standard. IBM is one of the companies pushing for the
use of ODF in companies and government organizations that are creating
mandates to only use technology based on open standards in their IT
architectures. "They are certainly related," he said of the ISO vote
and IBM's decision to join OpenOffice.org. "We think that it's now
time to make sure there is a public code base that implements this
spec so we can attract a critical mass to build these new value
propositions." Sun founded OpenOffice.org and offers its own commercial
implementation of the suite, called StarOffice. The company, a long-time
IBM competitor in the hardware and software markets, also has been
the primary contributor to the code, one of the reasons IBM balked
for so long before joining the group. CLICK HERE
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