14 DAY TRIAL // Today the OpenOffice.org community announced that IBM will collaborate with OpenOffice.org on the development of new OpenOffice.org software, including accessibility enhancements and will be making future contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org.
Rich Green, Executive Vice President at Sun Microsystems Software department, said: "In the seven years since Sun founded the project, OpenOffice.org has fueled and filled the need for document data and productivity tools that are open and free. Open source software and ODF are having a profound impact around the world, with numerous communities and organizations coming together to support these initiatives and governments, and corporations and schools standardizing on the software. We look forward to working with IBM and the other members of OpenOffice.org to ensure that this momentum continues. We invite others to join us in the community and participate in building the future as OpenOffice.org and ODF continue to gain popularity across the planet".
Mike Rhodin, General Manager of IBM's Lotus division, declared that IBM is very pleased to join the OpenOffice.org community, and that he's optimistic and certain that IBM's contribution of technology and engineering resources will provide benefits to all OpenOffice.org users around the world.
For the development of OpenOffice.org, IBM will dedicate 35 programmers, all located in China, and will contribute with some accessibility technology, a project called iAccessible2. An interface designed at first to make Windows friendlier to persons with disabilities, has been used, in part, to make ODF more accessible to them. This led to an increased interest from the governments around the world, which often require the technology to be accessible to all of their users, including the disabled.
Sun won't have versions of OpenOffice.org that support OOXML, because their customers haven't asked for such a capability yet, and they consider the use of ODF better than the use of OOXML.