Award-winning leading Open Source productivity suite widely used in 228 countries; over 20 million downloads of latest version since its release in May 2012

Forest Hill, MD – 18 October 2012 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Open Office has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

"The graduation of OpenOffice is testament to The Apache Way successfully scaling from incubating 'ingredient brands' to a highly-established end-user product," said ASF Executive Vice President and Apache OpenOffice mentor Ross Gardler. "The incubation process allowed experienced Apache contributors to mentor the project, helping both new and established OpenOffice contributors build an Apache-style community that is both open and diverse."

"The OpenOffice graduation is the official recognition that the project is now able to self-manage not only in technical matters, but also in community issues," said Andrea Pescetti, Vice President of Apache OpenOffice. "The 'Apache Way' and its methods, such as taking every decision in public with total transparency, have allowed the project to attract and successfully engage new volunteers, and to elect an active and diverse Project Management Committee that will be able to guarantee a stable future to Apache OpenOffice."

Initially created by Star Division in the 1990's, the OpenOffice code base was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999 and later Oracle Corporation in 2010, before being submitted to The Apache Software Foundation Incubator in June 2011.

During its development period in the Apache Incubator, the Apache OpenOffice project transitioned nearly 10 million lines of code, added numerous enhancements, and fixed dozens of user-reported bugs in the popular and free productivity suite. In addition, the software received five industry awards, ranging from individual component highlights to top download to best Open Source desktop office productivity application suite.

In May 2012 Apache OpenOffice v3.4 was released in 20 languages, and downloaded over 20 million times by individual, corporate, educational, and government users in 228 countries. Since then, the project has been working on new functionality, innovations, and releases targeted for Q1 and Q4 2013.

"It's really cool that OpenOffice is now a top-level project at Apache," said Juergen Schmidt, Apache OpenOffice Release Manager. "We met many challenges to achieve this milestone: our first Apache OpenOffice 3.4 release required our community to not only transition the code from Oracle repositories to Apache, but also replace incompatibly-licensed libraries in order to successfully meet Apache's licensing requirements. Now our Apache OpenOffice source code is available for the benefit of other projects and organizations."

"We are extremely proud of this important milestone and welcome OpenOffice into our stable of world leading Apache projects," added Gardler.

Availability and Oversight
Apache OpenOffice is available free of charge to any user for any purpose, and may be downloaded from http://openoffice.org. The product can be downloaded on an unlimited number of PCs for an unlimited number of users --completely free of any license fees. The project has a strong focus on open standards support, from ODF (the first implementor of ISO/IEC 26300) to future plans for CMIS, OpenSocial, and OData.

As with all Apache software, Apache OpenOffice software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Information on Apache OpenOffice source code, documentation, mailing lists, related resources, and ways to participate are available at http://openoffice.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "OpenOffice", "Apache OpenOffice", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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