OpenOffice - Partnerships

Partnerships

On 4 October 2005, Sun and Google announced a strategic partnership. As part of this agreement, Sun added a Google search toolbar to OpenOffice.org, and Google agreed to help distribute OpenOffice.org. Sun and Google also agreed to engage in joint marketing activities, and joint research and development. StarOffice was formerly distributed with the Google Pack.

On 23 May 2007, the OpenOffice.org community and Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Co, Ltd. announced a joint development effort focused on integrating the new features that have been added in the RedOffice localization of OpenOffice.org, as well as quality assurance and work on the core applications. Additionally, Redflag Chinese 2000 made public its commitment to the global OO.o community stating it would "strengthen its support of the development of the world's leading free and open source productivity suite", adding around 50 engineers (who have been working on RedOffice since 2006) to the project.

On 10 September 2007, the OO.o community announced that IBM had joined to support the development of OpenOffice.org. "IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite's software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products" as seen with Lotus Symphony. Sean Poulley, the vice president of business and strategy in IBM's Lotus Software division, said that IBM plans to take a leadership role in the OpenOffice.org community together with other companies such as Sun Microsystems. IBM will work within the leadership structure that exists. IBM also announced 35 developers would be assigned to work on OpenOffice.org, and that it would join the OpenOffice.org foundation. Commentators noted parallels between IBM's 2000 support of Linux and this announcement. In January 2012 IBM announced that they have donated Symphony's source code to Apache, which will be merged in OpenOffice.org 4 and that they want to release an "Apache OpenOffice IBM edition" and upgrade their users in early 2013.