IBM has joined the OpenOffice community, it was announced on Monday.

Although it has supported the open source rival to Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office suite for some time, this will mean that it will now actively contribute to the project that was founded by Sun Microsystems seven years ago and has that has attracted nearly 100 million downloads, according to its creators.

What this means for IBM’s own productivity suite of Lotus Notes applications, used by many System i users, is, as yet, unclear. But the OpenOffice community says that IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of Notes, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the features and code quality of OpenOffice. Besides working with the community on the free software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice technology in its products, said Monday’s statement.

Certainly, the Notes bigwigs at IBM were wheeled out to comment on the development. "IBM is very pleased to be joining the OpenOffice.org community. We are very optimistic that IBM's contribution of technology and engineering resources will provide tangible benefits to the community membership and to users of OpenOffice.org technology around the world," said Mike Rhodin, general manager of IBM's Lotus division. "We're particularly pleased to be teaming with the community to accelerate the rate of innovation in the office productivity marketplace. We believe that this relationship will improve our ability to deliver innovative value to users of IBM products and services.”

Some reports have suggested that IBM will reveal more about its plans next week. However, it is unlikely that it will allow its contribution to OpenOffice rock the Notes boat too much. After all, it has only just released Lotus Domino/Notes 8 (albeit without support for i5/OS’s DB2/400 database), which, in fact, incorporates some elements of OpenOffice anyway. And while Notes lost the battle with Microsoft Office years ago, the groupware still has many adherents, especially amongst large organisations, and, as such, is still a cash cow for Big Blue. Added to that, IBM and Sun have never been the happiest of bedfellows as they slug it out in the server market.

However, the move does add IBM’s full weight behind the Open Document Format ODF), upon which OpenOffice is based. This has been certified as a standard by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), unlike Microsoft's rival product, Office Open XML, which ISO has so far rejected, and it looks like IBM may be lobbying hard to keep it that way.

John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org marketing project lead, said in Monday’s statement: "We welcome IBM's contributions to further enhancing the OpenOffice.org product. But equally important is IBM's future commitment to package and distribute new works that leverage OpenOffice.org technology supporting the ISO OpenDocument Format standard. ODF is a once in a generation opportunity for the IT industry to unify round a standard, and deliver lasting benefit to all users of desktop technology."

Seamus Quinn, editor.