OpenOffice.org

Business type

Open100

Service/product description

OpenOffice.org is an international community of voluntary and sponsored contributors who produce the OpenOffice.org software – the leading alternative to Microsoft Office. The community aim to make the software accessible to as many people as possible by making it available free of charge for any purpose – domestic, educational, commercial, public administration, etc. The community aims to make the software available in any language (especially minority languages) and on every different type of computer. Version 3 of OpenOffice.org has been downloaded over 100 million times.

What does 'openness' mean in this case?

All the activities in OpenOffice.org community are open to anyone to participate. The Community attracts over 1,000 active contributors at any time who carry out the full range of activities of a software company: product development, porting, testing, documentation, translation, user support, marketing, etc. All the community’s activities are conducted in open forums on the internet; its annual conference is open to all comers, including commercial competitors. The source code of the software is licensed under the LGPL (an OSI approved licence). The community publishes APIs to help systems integrators use OpenOffice.org functionality in their products. OpenOffice.org is the only office software open which also allows developers to add features through extensions. The community was also instrumental in having ISO ratify the Open Document Format to secure open access to office documents for users for all time. The Community also enjoys open governance: eight of the nine equal positions on the OpenOffice.org Community Council are open to anyone – one position is reserved for the founding and principle sponsor, Sun Microsystems – and all Council proceedings are published on the internet.