IBM finally joins OpenOffice.org community
by Volker Weber
So far IBM has only taken from the OpenOffice.org community without contributing anything back. This is about to change:
10 September 2007 -- The OpenOffice.org community today announced that IBM will be joining the community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software. 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.
Comments
It was about time.
Indeed, about time. IBM's reluctance to contribute to openoffice always seemed odd to me, given what they did with Eclipse.
Presumably this is all about ODF rather than IBM being altruistic. However, regardless of motive, this is welcome news.
I think it is part of IBM coming to terms with SUN. There were a number of indicators, that part of the rivalry has been put behind. IBM joining OpenOffice, SUN signing agreements with IBM running Solaris on IBM gear and IBM stuff on Solaris. Looks there are some bigger fish to fry the two working together.
:-) stw
P.S.: And I still think Apple should throw away Darwin and use (Open)Solaris below their lovely UI.
IBM being altruist? Where? How? I think Stephan is right on the spot: There are bigger fish to fry. IBM is not in the charity business. With contributions like the one to the eclipse foundation or now this one, they most certainly pursue a business goal. In the end, they have shareholders to make happy, employees to pay, etc. Part of the calculation may be to harm competitors (in this case: to break the dominance of MS-based apps to break the dominance of Windows). After all, who would you turn to for services or complementing technology, if you are based on the open source technology that IBM has made a major contribution to?
This seems like good news. In particular, IIRC the Lotus R8 OO bits were from when IBM forked some code from OO a couple of years ago. So hopefully this will help both work together.
@Stephan I am not sure about all of openSolaris, but ZFS would be a wonderful idea for Apple.
@Lee ZFS is "kind of" coming in OS X. After a lot of yes / no confusion, it looks like a basic ZFS implementation will be available via the Terminal in Leopard.
Apple and Sun aren't strangers -- consider the adoption of DTrace for example:
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