Press Release: The ODF Toolkit Project, OpenOffice.org
The future of OpenOffice.org extends beyond the office suite. With the
creation of our new ODF Toolkit Project
(http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org/), which we are announcing today, we
are inviting developers everywhere to take the source of the world's
leading Free and Open office productivity suite in bold new directions.
These may include technologies that engage tools for collaboration,
communication and content creation of every kind; tools that will
complement and even transcend the already powerful productivity suite.
The anchor of this new project is the OpenDocument Format (ODF), the ISO
and OASIS standard format for office applications and the most flexible
and adaptable format for the future.
Any application can be engineered to express its files in the ODF and
any application can open and edit ODF files created by another compliant
application. Vendor lock-in, in which the user must continue to use
expensive and proprietary software only because the files created using
it are unreadable by other applications, has been the bane of
governments, businesses, and individuals for at least the last
twenty-five years. With the ODF users reclaim their works and vendor
lock-in is eliminated. It is for this reason that governments and
businesses are looking to the ODF and OpenOffice.org. The stakes are too
high.
The ODF Toolkit Project takes that freedom even further. Developers are
not bound by the legacy constraints of the office suite; they will be
able to more easily include ODF in their applications or create new
applications that use ODF. It does not matter whether it extracts,
manages, creates, or integrates information. The ODF Toolkit Project
lowers the barriers to working with and implementing the ODF for all.
Users will obviously benefit, and almost immediately. To give just an
example: The future of collaboration and communication, not to mention
much of commerce, depends on applications that can exchange files
without the hassle of incompatibility; the future depends on truly open
and flexible standards and formats. But much of what is created today
and almost all that is exchanged uses proprietary formats, effectively
limiting collaboration.
With the ODF Toolkit Project, any suitable application, large or small,
will find it easier to implement the ODF, allowing users to create and
exchange, collaborate on or simply save their files as they please,
without the fear of vendor lock-in or file obsolescence.
Developers and others interested in contributing are invited to join us
now and make something new!
To learn more go to http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org .
--The OpenOffice.org Team
* About OpenOffice.org
The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and
sponsored contributors who develop, support, and promote the leading
open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org®. OpenOffice.org's
leading edge software technology (UNO) is also available for developers,
systems integrators, etc. to use in OpenOffice.org extensions or in
their own applications.
OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office Applications
(OpenDocument) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300), as well as legacy
industry file formats and is available on major computing platforms in
over 90 languages. OpenOffice.org software is provided under the GNU
Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and may be used free of charge for
any purpose, private or commercial. The OpenOffice.org Community
acknowledges generous sponsorship from a number of companies, including
Sun Microsystems, the founding sponsor and primary contributor.
* Links
The ODF Toolkit Project can be found at http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org
You can go there to learn more and join the project.
The OpenOffice.org Community can be found at http://www.openoffice.org
To learn more about the Community see http://about.openoffice.org
The Native Language Project is at
http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html
Further information about OpenOffice.org products:
* The OpenOffice.org office suite for users:
http://www.openoffice.org/product
* OpenOffice.org Universal Network Objects (UNO) for developers:
http://udk.openoffice.org
* OpenOffice.org Software Development Kit (SDK) for developers:
http://api.openoffice.org
* Press Contacts
Louis Suarez-Potts (UTC -05h00)
OpenOffice.org Community Manager
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
+1 (416) 625 3843
John McCreesh (UTC +0h00)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
+44 (0)7 810 278 540
Cristian Driga (UTC +0200)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Co-Lead
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
+40 7887 000 60
Worldwide Marketing Contacts
http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html
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