OpenOffice.org to be released to Community

Oracle has announced that it will move OpenOffice.org to a community based open source project. This follows the foundation of The Document Foundation and the start of LibreOffice in September 2010. At the time The Document Foundation asked for the trademarks of OpenOffice.org to be donated by Oracle to The Document Foundation. Oracle refused and as a result The Document Foundation were forced to find another name for their distribution. Subsequently members of the OpenOffice Community Council who had started The Document Foundation were asked to resign by Oracle employee Louis Suárez-Potts.

The question now being asked by the open source community is will Oracle continue to support the OpenOffice project financially and with development resources, or will they reassign those resources to their closed source office productivity project?

OpenOffice.org isn't the only project with an uncertain future after the acquisition of Sun. The acquisition of Sun saw Oracle take control of MySQL, Solaris, OpenOffice.org and Java. Many of the core team members of MySQL left Oracle to start their own company. In November Oracle increased the minimum price for MySQL support on a server from US$599 to US$2,000. The last version of OpenSolaris was in November 2010, while Oracle have discontinued releases of OpenSolaris.

Not even Java has escaped, with Oracle filing a lawsuit against Google for using Java like technology on the Android operating system. This has raised serious questions in the software development community about whether Oracle will file lawsuits against other open source projects such as Python which may infringe Sun's Java patents. At the same time Oracle continue to promote "Unbreakable Linux" and profit from Linux. Oracle has it's own Office Productivity offering, which is competitive to OpenOffice.org.