OpenOffice Has Been Accepted by the Apache Foundation

The results are in on the voting to make OpenOffice.org an Apache Incubator project and the idea got approved, by a majority of voters. There has been some criticism over the idea of turning over OpenOffice source code, now owned by Oracle, to the Apache foundation, while the Document Foundation was carrying on with LibreOffice, a fork of the original OpenOffice.org.

It seems that all parties came to an agreement and decided to allow Apache to take over OpenOffice in the hope that it would not be creating a competing office suite, but rather work on creating a reference implementation of the open document formats and other components.

It is too early to make a prediction on the future of the project, but one idea that is being put forward and gaining weight is this, of not competing with LibreOffice and rather becoming the basis of other office suites.

Not everyone agrees on this, so it's by no means final. Whatever the case, it's clear that the project has its fair share of supporters. Admittance was approved by an overwhelming majority.

Already, there are 87 volunteers that pledged to work on OpenOffice under Apache guidance, as well as 8 Apache mentors joining.

It's just the beginning though, the project has to prove itself, it has to be able to get traction and organize internally for it to become a full-fledged Apache project, so far it's being labeled as "Podling," a project that's still being evaluated.

The hope is that, under the new guidance, the OpenOffice project will spur greater developments in the open-source office suite world enabling this type of projects as a whole, rather than just one product, i.e. LibreOffice, to gain more market share and start challenging the entrenched Microsoft Office. [via The H]