Oracle will move OpenOffice.org to a community-based open source project and no longer offer a commercial version of Open Office.

"Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organisation focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis," said Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect.

Open Office is an open source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and databases.

"We intend to begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office. Oracle will continue to strongly support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF)," added Screven.

Oracle says it will continue to make investments in open source technologies that are "strategic to our customers including Linux and MySQL”.