Oracle Corporation has announced its plan to move OpenOffice.org to a purely community-based open source project, which will see the company no longer delivering a commercial version of the Open Office productivity software suit.

 

This move follows in the wake of several key OpenOffice.org development personal leaving the project last year, to establish LibreOffice. Like OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice is a free open-source personal productivity suite for Windows, Mac as well as Linux, and it consists of six applications (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base) for document production and data processing.  

 

“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,” said Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect.

 

“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).”

 

The company also stated that it will continue to make large investments in open-source technologies that are strategic to its consumers such as Linux and MySQL. Oracle is focused on Linux and MySQL, as both of these products have won broad based adoption among commercial as well as government clients.