I could be wrong, but - I thought Oracle did release the entire project, but they didn't move quick enough for the Libre Office devs who wanted it right away.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffic...

Yah didn't move quick enough. It took 2 years. Would you wait?

First of all, these people preemptively forked Open Office on September 28, 2011 after Oracle purchased Sun "over concerns that Oracle would either discontinue OpenOffice.org". They didn't wait until Oracle announced a discontinuation.

Then Oracle discontinued support because of the fork. That was in April, 2012. So, it wasn't 2 years - more like 6 or 7 months.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Initial_release

IMO, had the Libre Office crowd played their cards right, they could have saved a ton of work and had a better name.

Wrong. "These people" had been having a lot of issues for many, many years with Sun. They actually created their fork in 2007 as part of Go-OO, due to an increasing frustration with not being able to contribute patches and enhancements back to OpenOffice.org.

It was discontinued and folded into LibreOffice only later. That Oracle discontinued support is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it was that they never provided ready support or accepted enhancements or patches in the first place.