IBM has long been involved with the ODF file format, and has even embedded a customized version of OpenOffice.org into Lotus Notes 8, but now they’ve taken their commitment one step further and formally joined the OpenOffice.org Community.

The press release announces, “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.”

IBM will assign 35 developers to work fulltime on OpenOffice.org itself, and will leverage OOo technologies in other products (as they’ve already done with Lotus Notes). Sounds like a very healthy and sustainable relationship with the community will come out of this!

Slashdot discusses the announcement here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 7:08 am and is filed under ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.