OpenOffice – A House of Sand

When the Apache OpenOffice team inside Oracle was disbanded, primarily because of the success of LibreOffice, it became logical to me that the trademark should be handed over to LibreOffice, and all interested parties should join up there. It didn’t make sense to incubate another new team when LibreOffice had just built everything they needed and recruited most of the interested third-parties. Furthermore, the Apache proposal would be unable to take code from LibreOffice because their policies forbid copyleft. Given such a proposal, it would have been appropriate to look at the work LibreOffice was doing. If Apache found they wanted 99% of LibreOffice changes, that is useful data to let them know if their plans would hurt their efforts. Unfortunately, they didn’t learn very many facts about LibreOffice. They think about it like tomato sauce.