Oracle Shows Public Support for OpenOffice.org, ODF Plugfest

Oracle (News - Alert) has sought to dispel rumors and doubts over its commitment to OpenOffice.org on Wednesday, saying it will participate in the ODF Plugfest event in Brussels this week and backs future plans for the open source productivity suite.

Oracle very much in public has demonstrated its commitment to the OpenOffice.org community, by participating in the ODF Plugfest, being held in Brussels, October 14-15.

The ODF plugfest is an ongoing series of vendor-neutral events, bringing together implementers and stakeholders of the standard.

The goal is to achieve maximum interoperability by running scenario-based tests in a hands-on lab and discuss new and proposed features of the ODF specification.

On the fifth anniversary of the Open Document Format “ODF” becoming an international standard, Oracle said it “applauds the community and OASIS for its efforts and renews its commitment to the ODF-based OpenOffice.org productivity suite.”

OpenOffice.org 3 is a leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all a user’s data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

“Oracle’s growing team of developers, QA engineers, and user experience personnel will continue developing, improving, and supporting OpenOffice.org as open source, building on the 7.5 million lines of code already contributed to the community,” the company said in a statement.

Oracle said it further demonstrates its commitment to OpenOffice.org with new versions of this free product in collaboration with the community – OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 and OpenOffice.org 3.3 Beta – both representing advances in features and performance advancements with the introduction of new tools and extensions.

Significant community contributions include localization, quality assurance, porting, documentation and user experience.

Oracle’s ongoing support for OpenOffice.org reinforces its commitment to developing software based on open standards, providing IT users with flexibility, lower short- and long-term costs and freedom from vendor lock-in.

By investing significant resources in developing, testing, optimizing, and supporting other open source technologies such as MySQL, GlassFish, Linux, PHP, Apache, Eclipse, Berkeley DB, NetBeans, VirtualBox, Xen, and InnoDB, Oracle is invested in their future development and contributing back to the communities that produce it, the company said.

With more than 100 million users, OpenOffice.org is the “most advanced, feature-rich open source productivity suite, and continued contributions through www.openoffice.org will only improve this already popular software,” according to the company’s statement.

Oracle said it views “ODF as critical to providing OpenOffice.org with a complete, open, and modern document format, empowering interoperability and choice on the desktop.”

Oracle says it also invites community participation in the OpenOffice.org conference, ODF Plugfests, and discussion groups, and welcomes contributions to the code base.

Meanwhile, after 10 years’ successful growth with Sun Microsystems (News - Alert) as founding and principle sponsor, the OpenOffice.org project launched an independent foundation called "The Document Foundation," to fulfill the promise of independence written in the original charter.

Oracle, which acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years.

Pending this decision, the brand "LibreOffice" has been chosen for the software going forward.