Oracle has passed control of the OpenOffice.org code base to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator project. OpenOffice.org is Microsoft Office’s main competitor, and is one of the most popular productivity software products on the market.

“Donating OpenOffice.org to Apache gives this popular consumer software a mature, open, and well established infrastructure to continue well into the future,” Oracle Corporate Architecture Group chief Luke Kowalski said in a statement.

Jim Jagielski, the foundation’s president, welcomed the addition of OpenOffice.org to ASF, though this donation, despite its existing reputation, will still have to go the lengthy process involving the Apache Foundation’s acceptance of candidates.

OpenOffice.org’s rival, LibreOffice by The Document Foundation (TDF), is also gaining from the transit of the popular software to ASF. In a statement , TDF welcomed the release of “key user features… in a form that can be included into LibreOffice”. This statement continued to note that the foundation would welcome a merger of the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice communities into a single one, now that Oracle is out of the picture.

While this goal may not have been necessarily effected by the transfer, it did open up some “future-proof licensing” options.

Apache has a long line of open products – now including OpenOffice.org. Hadoop is also in this list, and companies have been making the most of the open source data management platform.

RainStor recently released RainStor 4.5 for Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop, the most prominent commercial Apache Hadoop distribution out there. Version 4.5 greatly helps in improving analytics performance and efficiency, and comes along Datameer’s $9 million round of funding. The startup offers a Hadoop-based analytics offering.

The cloud’s open-source movement has several major players leading charge, and OpenStack is among the biggest. Thanks to the cost-effectiveness of the open source cloud as well as its other benefits, companies are showing growing interest in this field, which means good business for Rackspace.