Continuing its longstanding commitment to open source, IBM has announced it will take an active, supportive role in the new OpenOffice.org code base submitted to The Apache Software Foundation Incubator. As part of the news, IBM will contribute staff resources to collaborate with the Apache community during the project's incubation period to further the Open Document Format standard.

The move will help facilitate the long-term viability and new innovation for OpenOffice.org development in collaboration with the Apache community. IBM plans to commit new project members and individual contributors from its global development team to strengthen the project and ensure its future success.

"Open source and standards are key to making our planet smarter and improving the way we live and work," said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president, IBM Collaboration Solutions. "As IBM celebrates its Centennial, we're actively investing in projects that will help our clients to collaborate in an open manner over the next 100 years."

IBM's participation is the latest of many the company has made to open software development. These include IBM contributing code and staff resources to Apache projects, the initial formation of the Eclipse Foundation, and over a decade of working with industry colleagues on Linux. In 2007, IBM introduced Lotus Symphony, IBM's no-charge, on-premise, office productivity suite based on the Open Document Format standard.

The Open Document Format is the standard for document interoperability across software from many vendors. Advances around ODF, combined with alternative forms of communication (email, IM, tweets, blogs), cloud delivery models for business applications, growth in smart, mobile devices, and economic pressures are all converging to apply pressure to the status quo of documents. As these industry factors converge, IBM is helping organizations move towards a model that offers low-cost acquisition of document tools, coupled with high value and high collaboration solutions around a document. This news strengthens IBM's ability to continue to offer its own distributions based on the OpenOffice code base and make its own contributions to reinforce the overall community.

IBM's contribution to the incubating OpenOffice.org code base at Apache will further advance the adoption of office productivity suite alternatives.

For more information on IBM's open source initiatives, visit http://www.ibm.com/opensource.