IBM this week published Lotus Symphony, based on an earlier version of the OpenOffice. "It a suite of free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations."
The software, which is available gratis, but not under an Open Source licence, runs equally well on PCs running Microsoft Windows or GNU/Linux. The suite of office applications supports documents using the ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF). IBM notes: "This allows organisations to access, use and maintain all their documents for the long-term, without worrying about ongoing software licensing and royalty fees."
Symphony offers office applications ready to be used in a service oriented IT architecture (SOA). It is built using the code for OpenOffice and embedding it in Lotus Expeditor, IBM's SOA client for PCs, laptops and mobile devices.
IBM says Symphony will enable organisations to "unlock their information, making it universally accessible on any platform and on the Internet in highly flexible ways."
Details on Symphony's licence were given in an interview published by IT news service Zdnet with Alan Lepofsky, a member of the team responsible for Symphony. Lepofsky compares the license used for Symphony to the licence used for the community edition for its DB2 relation database management system. Symphony is not released using the IBM public license. "The IBM version is free, and with that comes support from IBM, the ability to upload and share templates, but it’s not an open source version."
The company yesterday added to its announcement that it expects to use more recent versions of OpenOffice in it next release. "As a new member of the OpenOffice development community we are pleased to be releasing our first version of Lotus Symphony based on the OpenOffice. V1.2 code base. We are making plans for future releases of Lotus Symphony which will incorporate the updated OpenOffice.org code as well as additional enhancements."
OpenOffice developers, meeting in Barcelona this week, announced the latest version, 2.3, and said a version for Mac OS X is planned for September 2008.
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