OpenOffice to become community-based project

Software major, Oracle on Friday said it will no longer sell the commercial version of OpenOffice.org and will hand over the software to the open source community.

Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, Oracle, said, ''Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organisation focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis.''

The company though said it will continue to make large investments in its open source technologies - Linux and MySQL. Both these products, Oracle said, have broad adoption among commercial and government customers.

Screven added that the Oracle will continue to support open standards-based document formats such as the Open Document Format (ODF).

OpenOffice was initially built by Sun Microsystems as an alternative to Microsoft Office for supporting the ODF standard.

After Sun's acquisition by Oracle, many of OpenOffice developers fell through with the management and set up a similar open source project LibreOffice. The first stable version of LibreOffice was released by developers earlier this year.