Oracle: OpenOffice.org to become "a Community-based Project" - Update

Oracle has announced that it intends OpenOffice.org to become a "purely community-based open source project" and that it plans to no longer offer a commercial version of OpenOffice. Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect, said the company intends "working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office."

He said that because there was a "breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications", that the company believed the OpenOffice.org project would be "best managed by an organisation focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis".

It was unclear if Oracle intended to continue investing in OpenOffice. The company referred to its intent to "support the adoption of open standards-based document formats such as Open Document Format (ODF)" and its "long history" of investing in the development of open source products which were strategically important to its customers.

It was also unclear if the announcement meant Oracle would be reaching out to the Document Foundation's LibreOffice project which forked from OpenOffice.org in September 2010 to produce a community based version of OpenOffice. Meanwhile, today, the OpenOffice.org developers announced a beta version of OpenOffice 3.4.

Oracle has a web-based office suite, Oracle Cloud Office, which is a proprietary suite which supports ODF. The announcement suggests that Oracle will be focussing its commercial resources on that suite.

Update - Since this article was written, Oracle appears to have also removed the pages for its proprietary Oracle Cloud Office suite from their web site.

See also:

• OpenOffice.org to become a purely community-based project, an Oracle blog post.

(djwm)