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Oracle announced today that it will contribute the OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Software Foundation, where the free office productivity suite will become part of Apache's incubator program.

The announcement comes after a rocky year for OpenOffice, which was largely abandoned by Oracle and turned over to the community, many of whom in turn forked the project to LibreOffice and created The Document Foundation.

Oracle made the announcement today that OpenOffice will become a community project and no longer a commercial endeavor.

It's not a surprising move. But it does feel like a victory for the open source community and a sign that Oracle may be easing up a bit on its hard-line stance toward the open source community.

But it's not unfair to say that OpenOffice has seen better days. OpenOffice had its own glory when Sun Microsystems was an independent company with a belief in open source and a commitment to the project.

To most people, the term "open source" immediately conjures an image of two geeks sitting in a dark room (probably a basement) -- curtains drawn, McDonald's remains strewn across the desk, and 42 oz sodas within arms' reach -- coding away at their computers, listening to Linkin Park or a game soundtrack. People automatically associate it with endless lines of code, back-end technology, server rooms, computer science labs, and experimental (read: unsafe and buggy) technology.

In reality, open-source software provides stable solutions, created by people and for people and used by companies of all sizes. Use Firefox? That's open-source software. Google Chrome? It too is based on an open-source code. Ever look up a term on Wikipedia? The site is completely built on user-generated code and content. "In fact," says Allison Randal, Program Chair of OSCON, "chances are you're using a lot more open-source software than you know: on your computer or powering you favorite websites."

OpenOffice, which, according to our latest poll, is one of the most popular word processors among our readers, just announced the first release candidate for OpenOffice 3. This is the first major release of OpenOffice since 2005. Most of the updates are a lot more subtle than Microsoft's switch to the Ribbon interface in Office 2007, but the team has added a lot of new functionality and user interface enhancements to the OpenOffice suite that make this a worthwhile release for those who already use OpenOffice.