Big Blue has followed the footsteps of Oracle and has ceded the source code for its Symphony office suite to the Apache Foundation, which now could follow the project under its umbrella of Open Source initiatives, or could merge with OpenOffice.org , the solution that is based precisely Symphony.
Kevin Cavanaugh, a director of IBM, said, “Before the entry Apache, barely been enough innovation in this area over the past 10 years . [Symphony] has been limited because we have not had a real open source community with a mature management model “.
shown in ComputerWorld, IBM launched Symphony in 2007 as a free office suite for companies that will use the commercial proprietary solution from Microsoft.
decision to donate the code “ charity is not a decision by IBM . We have lots of cutting-edge technologies in areas such as statistical genreación, trade and social software. Every time we release an IT investment [as Symphony] opened our ability to offer more efficient investment “.
Although Apache is responsible for the suite, it appears that IBM will not completely abandoned the project, and in fact are to maintain their own version : “ do not want to influence the effort of Apache, but we are willing to offer major contributions to our engineering resources to this initiative. We do not want to do it alone , “stated Cavanaugh.
Some features of Symphony could be interesting for OpenOffice.org, such as better compatibility with ODF , or model of user interface, simple and resembles in some ways Tape the latest versions of Microsoft Office.