"Earlier this year the OpenOffice.org code base was donated to The Apache Software Foundation. The resulting project, Apache OpenOffice (Incubating) is progressing well as a podling in the Apache Incubator with a rapidly growing community and project infrastructure (seehttp://incubator.apache.org/projects/openofficeorg.html). This open letter seeks to articulate our vision for the future of Apache OpenOffice within the wider Open Document Format ecosystem." - Apache Software Foundation

The new version of ODF delivers many enhancements called for by the international community including support for digital signatures, semantic web technology, and the OpenFormula spreadsheet language.

OpenOffice.org has been accepted as an Apache Incubator project and will now begin its development as a "podling" – the Apache name for projects in the incubator. An open public vote on the Apache Incubator list saw a solid majority of both binding and non-binding votes for accepting the project...A reference implementation could be used by other projects, beyond OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, and help establish the ODF document formats more widely in both open source and proprietary software.

The document as we know it — static and one-sided — has disappeared. Documents today are no longer stand-still and no longer offer only one view. The old model doesn’t work for today’s social and always-connected business. Business communication has evolved to become more fluid, dynamic and collaborative and is now an integral part of business processes. And the concept of a document (whether that be text, spreadsheet, presentation or a hybrid approach) is still one of the

Oracle has decided that the best way forward for Open Office is to turn it back into a community-led project. Oracle had taken control of what was widely regarded as the most complete rival to Microsoft's Office business suite after it purchased Sun Microsystems. At the time Oracle's involvement with Open Office led to the creation of The Document Foundation and its Libre Office project in case Oracle turned Open Office into a closed source project. While Libre Office continues to go from strength to strength, Open Office has seen its community