The Apache Software Foundation and The Document Foundation have to overcome their egos and do the right thing. Then we could credit TDF with 'liberating' OOO and ASF with closing the deal.

If they don't merge OOO and LO this 'donation' could create a new division in the Open Source community.

Except for licensing. LGPL prevents proprietary forks. IIRC Apache allows them. I wonder why Oracle would want to change the license (or not donate OOo directly to the Document Foundation)

With distros having put their support behind LibreOffice, I don't think that there will be much competition. I think they will either continue to be very similar, or LibreOffice will steam ahead...

The open source community can't be divided. Or do you equate a 'division' with a fork, like emacs/xemacs, openbsd/netbsd, joomla/mambo?

"Apparently this is a somewhat divisive attempt by an exiting Oracle, along with IBM to sideline the existing developer community, their governance, their aspirations, membership, licensing choice (explicitly adapted to meet IBM's needs incidentally), bylaws, and so on. All of this despite a profound, frequently stated open-ness to including new (particularly large) corporate contributors inside TDF, and taking their advice seriously."

http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2011-06-01.html

It's probably too late to engender any kind of good will out to this though. They put both of those communities through hell. And neither of these products fall under an Oracle core-competency.

But I wouldn't expect the same result with either Java or MySQL anytime soon. Those are both things that Oracle "gets" and knows how to extract profit from.

I'm really hopeful that the LibreOffice and OOo communities could now get together and work together and even collapse the code base to one codebase again, but I'm doubtful that will happen. It would be a huge shame to see split efforts continue as it would hurt both projects and, frankly, they are both still lacking FAR behind any of the proprietary competitors.

Not to mention Calligra is rapidly gaining ground on both. If Calligra gets the same level of MS office compatibility, it would leapfrog both OOo and LibreOffice in my mind.

This is going to be a test of the two communities and their ability to see the big picture as well as navigate a political situation. I really am wondering how they will both will fare.

From what I understand, someone just needs to make a dedicated browser for Office online.

Sure, and ditch the LGPL license and adopt the Apache one...

With a project of this size, scope, and adoption, I'd imagine the "acceptance" will be somewhat rubber stamped, and the process will focus on setting up the proper ASF development environment, review of existing code, etc.

I think a lot of people are looking for drama where none exists; ASF is just following the same procedures that EVERY project would be forced to go through.

I think that it's too late to really damage LibreOffice though. They have got a lot of support so far.

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/06/01/open-office.html

So why do Oracle want to make the OOo code available to Microsoft and IBM for use in their office suites? This may make it harder for OOo to compete with proprietary office software.

Are you kidding?!

They could donate them to the FSF, ASF or any other non-profit entity dedicated to promote of free and open-source software. Donating them to Google would create a whole lot of temptations the folks in Mountain View really don't need.