"There has been a lot of speculation about IBM?s role in
Oracle?s donation of the OpenOffice.code to the Apache Software
Foundation, and its decision to follow the code to Apache, rather
than work with the community on LibreOffice. It is usually
suggested that the decision was driven by licensing issues. A
liberal licensing regime, such as the Apache licence affords,
allows the office suite to become a repository of useful components
for web office, system management and data warehousing tools that
reach far beyond the scope of a stand alone office suite, and there
is no obligation to give changes back to the community.
"The unhappy result is that there are now two versions of the
most successful open source office suite, a community fork,
developed primarily by SUSE and Red Hat engineers, and an Apache
fork, which is effectively run by IBM engineers."
