Martin LaMonica reports in a CNET News.Com blog that Ken Bisconti, VP of the Workplace, Portal and Collaboration division at IBM, has indicated there isn’t likely to be contributions from IBM back to the open source project OpenOffice.org

IBM utilised an early release of OpenOffice.org as the basis for its productivity editors that are built into the IBM Workplace Managed client. Although from the same original codestream, IBM made significant modifications to the code to fit into its Workplace platform - which apparently makes it difficult to contribute modifications back to the core OpenOffice.org stream.

The key efforts where collaboration is likely in my own opinion is in the OpenDocument format - which IBM is strongly backing, and will be an important component shared between the OpenOffice.org project, and IBM’s own software implementations. I believe efforts in improving the capabilities of the file format, standardising it, and promoting widespread use and support format for OpenDocument - will be much more beneficial to everyone in the short term.

Read the rest of Martin’s article: IBM: No plans to contribute to OpenOffice.org

Tags:, , , ,