IBM donates open source code

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 non-profit Apache Software Foundation, says ComputerWorld.

“Prior to Apache's entry, there really hasn't been enough innovation in this area over the past 10 years,” says Kevin Cavanaugh, who is the IBM VP for business and technical strategy in collaboration solutions.

“It's been constrained because we haven't had a true open source community with a mature governance model.”

Using OpenOffice as a starting point, IBM first released Symphony in 2007 as a no-cost alternative for enterprises to Microsoft's Office Suite, according to PCWorld.

IBM hopes its potential customers will use the free Symphony instead of Microsoft Office, and other commercial office suites, and reallocate money they previously earmarked for these paid offerings to advanced IBM services and software instead.

The Apache Foundation will form a project team around Symphony, and IBM will continue to contribute to the project, as well as maintain their own version of Symphony.