Oracle to Make OpenOffice.org Community-Based

When a group of developers broke off from Oracle last year to establish the Document Foundation and create the new LibreOffice open-source office suite, it was unclear what would become of the well-known OpenOffice.org project they left behind. Today, Oracle has announced that it will no longer offer a commercial version of the OpenOffice.org software, and that it plans to move the suite to a purely community-based open source project.

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In a statement, Oracle Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven said, “Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis. We intend to begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office. Oracle will continue to strongly support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF).”

“Oracle has a long history of investing in the development and support of open source products,” Screven continued. “We will continue to make large investments in open source technologies that are strategic to our customers including Linux and MySQL. Oracle is focused on Linux and MySQL because both of these products have won broad based adoption among commercial and government customers.”

Oracle provided no additional information about OpenOffice.org, or its own proprietary Web-based office suite, Oracle Cloud Office, which also supports ODF.

The LibreOffice developers released their first stable version of that software earlier this year.