In the past few days, the giant internet corporation IBM has decided to donate Lotus Symphony, it’s own open source software, to the Open Office project.
There are many reasons why they’ve decided to do this but the main one is because they want to accelerate the development of this open source project. There is a lot of publicity around this project with many large corporations supporting it. The community work hard to make it the best they can and IBM want to support it themselves by giving them the code to Lotus Symphony.
According to them, this will allow our suite to increase its usability and performance as well giving it much more features. Lotus Symphony is well known around the world for being a great office suite for those with visual impairments. It makes it much easier for people with those people to navigate through and to create documents without any issues at all. With this development, it opens a whole new path for the software and it means that it could be usable for much more people.
Open Office was created many years ago and is known to be the biggest rival to the popular suite Microsoft Office. It’s a free alternative with much more features, gaining market share year on year. The biggest advantage of it is the fact that it is open source, it means that anyone can access the source code to donate code to the project to help make it better for everyone.
IBM are trying to help everyone by donating Lotus Symphony. This suite currently 3 different tools – a word processor, a spreadsheet program as well as a presentation program. All of them contain very basic features in comparison to other suites but as we’ve previously said, usability has been the main focus for this suite. One does wonder whether this donation has come because they simply aren’t able to compete with the likes of this office suite anymore, Lotus Symphony gained a lot of popularity in the past but has become unheard of in recent years.
The direction our software will take as a result of this donation is still unknown, but we can expect to receive more news about it very shortly. It is known that a new version of the suite is currently being worked on which should add a few extra features people have been looking for such as Subversion. Once this has been released, you’ll be able to find a free download for it here on our website. Don’t forget to come back often for all of the latest news and downloads!
Tags: ibm, lotus symphony, open office