The manifesto is also available as PDF from our website.



For the past ten years, the OpenOffice.org community has developed, supported, and promoted the world's leading open-source office productivity suite. We have attracted the support of tens of thousands of individuals and corporate bodies during this period.



We now call on all our supporters to follow us into the next phase of our development, as we become an independent Foundation.

Our values

WE COMMIT OURSELVES: WE REJECT: to eliminate the digital divide in society by giving everyone access to office productivity tools free of charge to enable them to participate as full citizens in the 21st century the ownership of office productivity tools by monopoly suppliers which imposes a de facto tax on global electronic free speech and penalises the economically disadvantaged to support the preservation of mother tongues by encouraging all peoples to translate, document, support, and promote our office productivity tools in their mother tongue the creeping domination of computer desktops by a single language forcing people to learn a foreign language before they can express themselves electronically to allow users of office productivity software to retain the intellectual property in the documents they create by use of open document formats and open standards the ownership of file formats by proprietary software companies – documents belong to their creators, not software vendors to an open and transparent peer-reviewed software development process where technical excellence is valued a closed software development process where errors can lie hidden and poor quality is accepted

Our way of working

Our core values lead us to believe in the following way of working:



the home for our activities should be an independent self-governing democratic foundation

membership of the foundation will be open to any individual who agrees with our core values and contributes to our activities

we encourage corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community

The Foundation will be realised in a not for profit organisation which will own assets and conduct financial and legal transactions on behalf of the Community

Note: The content of this page has been approved by the Steering Committee - do not change the content without permission by the Steering Committe