CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
17 October 2005
Company News
CollabNet Marks Five Years of Providing OpenOffice.org Project With Essential Collaboration Tools and Community Infrastructure
CollabNet announced its continued support for the OpenOffice.org community. Record levels of open source and corporate participation have grown the community to more than 272,000 registered users and in excess of 10 million web visitors per month from countries in every section of the world. Managed by CollabNet since the project's inception in 2000, OpenOffice.org reaches its five-year anniversary as one of the most successful open source projects in history.
OpenOffice.org is the open source project through which Sun Microsystems released the technology for the StarOfficeT Productivity Suite with the goal of creating, as a community, the leading international office suite compatible with all major platforms. The OpenOffice.org project provides the necessary facilities to make this open source technology available to the global developer community and free to download, use, and distribute. As the infrastructure provider of the community, CollabNet® Enterprise Edition serves as the hub for source code development. Additionally, CollabNet has provided consulting, training, and open source strategic advice throughout the lifecycle of the project.
"The five-year partnership between Sun and CollabNet has allowed the community to flourish and stand as a model to developers worldwide of the potential greatness of open source communities," said Louis Suarez-Potts, Community Manager of OpenOffice.org and the chair of the OpenOffice.org governing council. "The decision by Sun in 2000 to embrace open source is something that will surely be remembered as one of the turning points in modern software production."
With over 7.5 million lines of source code at the time of its release and 10 million now, OpenOffice.org is recognized as the largest single release of open source code ever. Since inception, there have been over 49 million downloads of the application which is now available in over 60 languages, 45 of which are supported. The OpenOffice.org community utilizes hundreds of mailing lists with 34,000 mail-list subscribers to facilitate communication on more than 100 projects, and many more subprojects.
OpenOffice.org also uses the CollabNet environment to create project roadmaps, facilitate technical project communication, resolve issues, and to archive history around all project activity. CollabNet provides a single location for all project communication and history; creating archives not only for code, but also for non-technical activities such as marketing plans. As a result, project leaders have greater insight into the tasks assigned to other members. One of the innovative capabilities unique to the CollabNet environment is that it enables not only developers and end users to communicate using the same tools, but project managers, CIOs, and other business executives as well. These executives can monitor activity on OpenOffice.org and use that information to plan for upgrades or implementation of the software or submit requests to the OpenOffice.org community to help meet their specific business objectives.
"The establishment of open source projects and communities like OpenOffice.org has fundamentally changed the way software is developed. And that change is very much for the better," said Brian Behlendorf, CTO at CollabNet. "Millions of developers and countless businesses across the globe currently leverage open source communities for competitive advantage. In fact, today the CollabNet environment powers a number of such communities, from java.net to the eBay Community Codebase to the Subversion open source project."
Become a member of the CIMdata PLM Community to receive your daily PLM news and much more.
Tell us what you think of the CIMdata Newsletter. Send your feedback.
CIMdata is committed to your privacy. Your personal information will never be sold or shared outside of CIMdata without your express permission.