Oracle announced Friday that it will no longer sell a commercial version of the Open Office productivity suite, and that the open-source OpenOffice.org will be transitioned to "a purely community-based open-source project."



From PCWorld:

Oracle will "begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office" and plans to continue supporting standards like ODF (Open Document Format), he said.

Screven went on to confirm Oracle's commitment to other open-source technologies, such as Linux and MySQL. "Oracle is focused on Linux and MySQL because both of these products have won broad based adoption among commercial and government customers," he said.

Oracle's decision suggests the company has had difficulty selling many Open Office licenses since it acquired Sun Microsystems, which sold the software under the name Star Office. Its move is apparently effective immediately; a number of links on its website related to Open Office were dead on Friday.

  Oracle Gives up on Commercial Open Office