Donating OpenOffice to Apache give this popular Microsoft Office alternative a mature, open, and well established infrastructure to continue its growth into the future.

“The Apache Software Foundation’s model makes it possible for commercial and individual volunteer contributors to collaborate on open-source product development,” says Luke Kowalski, vice president of Oracle Corporate Architecture Group .

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) provides organizational, legal and financial support for a broad range of open-source software projects. It also aims to develop new communities that adhere to the ASF’s guiding principles regarding open-source software development.

“We welcome highly-focused, emerging projects from individual contributors, as well as those with robust developer communities, global user bases, and strong corporate backing,” says Jim Jagielski, president of The Apache Software Foundation and proposed mentor for the OpenOffice community incubation process.

Details and further participation can be found at Apache’s incubator site.

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Oracle, OpenOffice’s main sponsor, builds extensions and “langpacks” that can be used with the current versions of OpenOffice. Additionally, the user community also contributes their own builds and “langpacks” as needed.

Users worldwide have access to OpenOffice and can also share their contributions to others, regardless of what language is used.

For more information or to find the OpenOffice language extensions, or to request additional languages, visit http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Languages.

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On October 28, 2009, OpenOffice 3.0 received its one hundredth million consumer download, furthering its reputation as the world’s leading open-source office suite software.

Often touted as the free replacement for Microsoft Office, OpenOffice only continues to grow with its community of beta testers, developers and users.

The community’s annual conference could not have been scheduled for a better time, with the prescheduled event coinciding the 100 millionth download of OpenOffice. Celebrations will peak at the conference in Orvieto, Italy on November 4.

“We are delighted to have the global OpenOffice community coming to Italy at such a memorable time,” says Italo Vignoli, spokesman for the OpenOffice conference organizing team. “Users are asking for a personal productivity suite, and we are giving them exactly what they want—without trying to force them to use other products they don’t need.”

The one hundred million download statistic is more impressive because that number is recorded from downloads via the OpenOffice website. It excludes groups of users who generally download software from other distributors or networks.

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Gary Edwards, an engineer involved in the open-source OpenOffice project and founder of the OpenDocument Foundation, on Thursday discussed the software plug-in on the Web site Groklaw.

The new program, which has been under development for about year and finished initial testing last week, is designed to let Microsoft Office manipulate OpenDocument format (ODF) files, Edwards said.

“The ODF Plugin installs on the file menu as a natural and transparent part of the ‘open,’ ‘save,’ and ‘save as’ sequences. As far as end users and other application add-ons are concerned, ODF Plugin renders ODF documents as if (they) were native to MS Office,” according to Edwards.

If the software, which is not yet available, works as described, it will be a significant twist to an ongoing contest between Microsoft and the backers of OpenDocument, a document format gaining more interest lately, particularly among governments.

“Having a third-party product to save OpenDocument files from Office could give OpenDocument-based products a bump in the marketplace,” said Stephen O’Grady, a RedMonk analyst.

OpenDocument is the native format for the OpenOffice open-source desktop productivity suite and is supported in others, including KOffice, Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice and IBM’s Workplace.

“To the extent that you get people authoring documents in a format that is natively compatible with OpenDocument, that’s an important first step over the long term” to migrating people to OpenDocument-based applications, O’Grady said.

On the other hand, the OpenDocument plug-in could keep people from adopting software built by any of Microsoft Office’s competitors. People who want to save documents in ODF can now use Microsoft Office, rather than OpenOffice or other Office alternatives. “It’s potentially a very positive thing for Microsoft,” O’Grady said.

–Martin LaMonica, CNET Staff Writer

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