IBM’s Lotus Office suite hasn’t been a huge challenger to Microsoft Office for over a decade. Nonetheless, IBM is going to open source the package in a similar way that Sun Microsystems open-sourced its StarOffice suite. Further, IBM is going to put money and as many as 35 full-time developers behind the endeavor.

This is as much a strategic move by IBM to undercut Microsoft’s dominance as much as it is an admittance that the IBM suite (acquired when IBM purchased Lotus, the company that invented the spreadsheet) probably isn’t selling anyway. Honestly, the only individuals I’ve met in the last 10 years who use Lotus work for either IBM or Lotus.

Still, this is great news for the OpenOffice standard and it means that there will soon be another reliable, robust, and FREE alternative for word processing, spreadsheeting, and slideshow presentations.