Of all the companies that support OpenOffice, there were only two that didn’t support the LibreOffice fork: Oracle and IBM. I could understand Oracle. While Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, didn’t really care about OpenOffice–after all Oracle essentially gave OpenOffice away to The Apache Foundation–I also know that Ellison wasn’t going to let The Document Foundation, LibreOffice’s parent organization, dictate terms to him. But, I’ve never quite understood why IBM didn’t help create LibreOffice. Be that as it may, IBM will be announcing tomorrow that it’s donating essentially all its IBM Lotus Symphony source code and resources to Apache’s OpenOffice project.
In an e-mail to the Apache OpenOffice e-mail list, IBM’s Open Document Format (ODF) architect Rob Weir let the cat out of the bag that IBM would be putting its Symphony code and resources behind OpenOffice.