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IBM Donates Symphony Code To Apache Software Foundation

Posted by timothy on from the don't-say-bequeath-until-you-die-please dept.

CWmike writes "Hoping to further sharpen OpenOffice's competitive viability against Microsoft Office, IBM is donating the code of its Symphony open source office suite to the nonprofit Apache Software Foundation. Apache could fold this code into its own open source office suite OpenOffice, on which Symphony was based. In June, Oracle donated the OpenOffice suite to Apache. 'Prior to Apache's entry, there really hasn't been enough innovation in this area over the past 10 years,' said Kevin Cavanaugh, an IBM vice president. 'It's been constrained because we haven't had a true open source community with a mature governance model.'"

3 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Innovation and Polishing by improfane · · Score: 3, Informative

    Freely available code, be it open source or academic are the original innovators. They seed ideas. They are not constrained by funding or time.

    Businesses adopt these ideas, invest into them and produce viable and profitable software. They create products, not innovations. They are restricted by time and profits.

    It would have been hard for the internet to be what it is today without freely available code.

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  2. Re:Donating open source? by Kjella · · Score: 4, Informative

    Can't they do that anyway? I thought that was the whole point of "open source".

    Lotus Symphony is not open source, it's a proprietary fork from an early version of OpenOffice with a license that permitted this. IBM has been offering it as freeware, so by offering this code to the Apache foundation they're looking to mend the old fork between OpenOffice and Symphony. It still would not mend the fork between OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but as far as IBM is concerned their Symphony code can now be used in both versions under the Apache license. This is a direct consequence of Oracle giving OpenOffice to Apache, IBM wasn't willing to give Symphony to Sun or Oracle, but they are willing to share it as an Apache project. So good move by IBM, another open source contribution from them.

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  3. Re:Donating open source? by Nursie · · Score: 3, Informative

    Oh hell yes!

    It's not got any of that old code in it, it's simply the name. It's (as previously mentioned) an OO.o fork ported to the eclipse framework.

    Compared to mainline OO.o or Libre Office I'm really not a fan. It seems slow and heavyweight. But apparently it does bring some good stuff to the table, specifically there are supposed to have been a lot of improvements on the way it imports and exports various file formats.