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IBM Joins OpenOffice.org Community

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the get-your-conspiracy-theories-warmed-up dept.

Petrushka writes "In a press release today, with accompanying press FAQ, IBM announces a change in its relationship to the OpenOffice.org development community. The upshot is that they're making a long-term commitment to OOo; no organization has paid off any other organization for this; they're devoting about 35 of their developers in China to OOo; and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies. You may recall that an alleged shortage of assistive technologies that work with OOo has been one of the big criticisms leveled against the idea of governments standardizing on the OpenDocument format, which is a file format that OOo and several other office suites support."

3 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Assistive technologies by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    OpenOffice.org itself doesn't lack assistive technologies. OOo on Windows lacks assistive technologies. OOo with GNOME or KDE integration gets the accessibility technologies of GNOME or KDE, respectively.

    Still, it's a welcome sight to see IBM participating in OOo development. OOo just keeps improving with every new release, and I find that I use it more than Microsoft Office, although I have both installed at work and at home.

    --
    My blog
  2. WTF? by spectrokid · · Score: 5, Informative

    IBM has its own office package: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/sma rtsuite/
    Is this another case of the one division not knowing what the other does, or is IBM giong to drop smartsuite?

    --

    10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then

  3. Re:faster!!! by Corporate+Troll · · Score: 5, Informative

    You're misinformed... OpenOffice.org has a few Java components (notabily in Base, I think) but it is not a Java application. You don't even need a JRE to run it.