[Discuss] OpenOffice.org

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 2:23 PM, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:
> The reason that LibreOffice broke off was because of Oracle's aquisition
> of Sun. It depends very much who gets the funding. Certainly IBM is a
> big funder and user of Apache. I would love to see IBM get more involved
> since I am now (as of next Jan 1) an IBMer. Currently I use both
> depending on where I have it installed.

IBM's interest is much more then just their general support of Apache
projects.  Their product "IBM Lotus Symphony" is based on OpenOffice 3
code.
They had a very good reason to push for some way to continue
development of the OpenOffice branch.   I'm guessing they thought
through the costs of switching to LibreOffice, taking the whole thing
in house, discontinuing Lotus Symphony, etc. and ended up pushing
Oracle to go the Apache project route.
The Apache route held out the hope that they wouldn't have to do all
of the continuing development while not requiring them to switch to
LibreOffice.  We'll see if it actually works out that way.  Or maybe
this was the cheapest way for Oracle to satisfy any contracts Sun/IBM
might have had relative to support of the OpenOffice 3 code base and
IBM was dragged kicking and screaming down that path.  Hard to tell
from the outside.

Bill Bogstad