"This morning brought the significant - and decade overdue
– announcement of the launch of an independent foundation to
host development of the open source, ODF-compliant OpenOffice
productivity suite. The good news of that lost decade is that under
Sun's ownership and control, the OpenOffice suite became the most
successful and widely implemented alternative to Microsoft's
Office, providing at least some degree of competition in a product
niche where it had been missing for far too long.
"The bad news is that in the same time period the OpenOffice
suite could have become so much more. As with other single-company
controlled efforts in the past (e.g., the Eclipse Foundation,
before IBM spun it out into an independent organization), other
companies that could have, and would have, made significant
contributions of personnel, funding and promotion stood aside."
