The Brazilian government has signed a letter of intent to work with both The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org community to develop the Office Suite platforms maintained by both communities. The letter asserts that the ODF standard is already a guarantee of interoperability within the government. As Brazil is one of the biggest users of both LibreOffice and OpenOffice with an estimated million public computers running the free/open source office suites, the govenment aims to make the national contribution to the projects more effective.

The letter(ODT document) was signed on July 1st, during the International Free Software Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. It was signed by Marcos Mazoni of the Brazilian government's Free Software Implementation Committee (CISL); Sady Jacques, for SoftwareLivre.org; Jomar Silva, for the Apache OpenOffice.org community; and Oliver Hallor, for the LibreOffice Community.

Simon Phipps, OSI board member and co-presenter of a session about OpenOffice.org at FISL, welcomed the announcement, writing: "This growth in the developer base seems to be exactly the sort of news we all need at the moment". The H has just published a feature article on the heritage of OpenOffice and LibreOffice by Richard Hillesley, "OpenOffice - splits and pirouettes", which Phipps refers to.

(djwm)