During OpenOffice.org's tenth anniversary, Oracle announced it will participate in ODF Plugfest, one of the conferences aimed at furthering the Open Document Format interoperability, held October 14 - 15 in Brussels . Oracle also stated they would continue developing, improving, and releasing OpenOffice.org as open source software.

As ODF celebrates its fifth anniversary, Oracle said they applaud its efforts and renewed their committment to OpenOffice.org. "Oracle's growing team of developers, QA engineers, and user experience personnel will continue developing, improving, and supporting OpenOffice.org as open source, building on the 7.5 million lines of code already contributed to the community." This might be seen in the continuing efforts of developers to release 3.3.x snapshots as well as previews into some of the new features and tools. For example, Ingrid Halama recently posted of some of the new features coming to Chart, (part 1, part 2). Niklas Nebel also shared some improvements in DataPilot.

This all comes a month after the formation of The Document Foundation and the announcement of LibreOffice. Charles-H. Schulz recently reported that LibreOffice was downloaded 80,000 times its first week and a new user forum quickly followed. A second beta emerged on October 11.

Oracle stated in the same announcement that it welcomes community participation in the project, discussions, and conferences. They are clearly hoping to convey that OpenOffice.org is not only still very much alive, but is conducting business as usual despite all the activity surrounding and developer exodus to LibreOffice. This is no doubt welcome news to the 100 million users of the OpenOffice.org suite.