The team behind Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice wants IBM to donate developer time to the open source productivity suite, the project's leader Louis Suarez-Potts told vnunet.com.

"IBM has refrained from contributing to the development. It has thereby declined to participate in the open source environment [around OpenOffice]," he said. "We invite IBM to contribute to OpenOffice."

IBM did not respond to repeated requests to comment. The vendor sells OpenOffice as part of its Workplace suite, a group of applications built on top of Lotus which organisations can host on a central server.

OpenOffice is a suite of productivity tools for text editing, spreadsheets and drawings. Sun acquired the product in 1999 and released the source code in 2000 under an open source licence. It uses the code as the foundation of StarOffice, a commercial version of the suite.

Sun is still the largest contributor, with about 100 developers, and other major supporters include Novell and Red Hat. There are roughly 600 active contributors, comprising individual coders and people working for commercial developers.

Suarez-Potts explained that he wants IBM's help in moving beyond the upcoming OpenOffice version 2.0. The suite has been around for about two decades and its age slows down the development process.

"It is very monolithic. There is lots of legacy [code] that makes it difficult to do things quickly," he said.

The upcoming version 2.0 is currently in beta. OpenOffice.org, the holding company for the application, has not yet set an official launch date.

"Because it's a big beta release, we really want to run it through the mill," said Suarez-Potts. "We shall release no code before its time."

Users will be able to download an update from the current version to 1.1.5 by mid May. The update will allow for a smooth upgrade to OpenOffice 2.0 when it becomes available.