Oracle owned Openoffice.org and newly formed The Document Foundation(TDF) are not going to be likely allies as it seems by recent developments. There is no doubt, with the formation of LO, the TDF has in a way become direct competitor of Openoffice.org or Oracle.
The remaining members of the Community Council, the governing body of Openoffice.org, have asked TDF members still on the CC to choose either CC or TDF. In case they want to stay with TDF they must resign from their CC posts.

Most CC members believed, as can be seen in the chat-log that they see a 'conflict of interest' here and can't have people from TDF to be on the CC as well. On the face it seems that CC members do not want any confusion among the customers, developers and industry partners by having the TDF representatives on the CC.

Pavel Janik, a developer with Openoffice.org said during the meeting that, "I (maybe I'm naive) expect that people with "conflict of interest" will automatically step down."

The split
The formation of TDF and LO does say there was some conflict between community members and the way Openoffice.org was managed by the new owner Oracle leading to the split. It also surfaced that the majority of CC members are Oracle employees. 

Oliver Hallout said during the chat session, "Well, you see, the reality is that I only see CorNows, christoph_n and ohallot as the community members and all other are now Oracle employees so I take it as Oracle wants us to get out."

It is easy to think that the way Oracle marginalised Open Solaris and focused on Oracle Solaris, it may sideline the free Openoffice and focus its resources on revenue generating Oracle Open Office, which was earlier known as StarOffice. The split says there is more than what appears on the surface.

Revenues run the veins of Oracle and not the source code. Oracle is a hard-core for-the-profit company. The way some Foss projects under Oracle are heading towards their end is worrisome.

MySQL and Openoffice are much more popular than OpenSolaris or Orca. It may be interesting to see for how long Oracle continue to support these projects without making a dime from them. The fate of OpenSolaris gives warning signals, and Openoffice.org and MySQL seems to be on the same path down the road.

Post TDF formation, Oracle reiterated its commitment to OpenOffice.org to strengthen the faith and trust of the OOo community members/developers in the company.

Oracle is now one of the biggest Free Software vendors, the company has an aggressive leader in Larry Ellison. In some utopian world we may hope that the company will value such FOSS projects and develop them as required. But in the real work, where the IT industry is yet to mature, it is hard for many of us to understand how Oracle, a proprietary company will continue to do it. For how long will Oracle support products which do not earn a dime for them?

Fearing such a scenario, concerned community members will try to keep the projects alive through a forks. Openoffice and MySQL are two major projects. There is a lot at stake.

The core of any Free or Open Source software is not any corporate entity but the community, the developers. Mega projects like GNU, Linux, Debian, Gnome, Apache, etc. are run by the community and not some company.

There are more than 450,000 people who have contributed to Openoffice.org. The real power is with these people and not Oracle. However, the challenge is to maintain a fork and bring all these people together. It takes a lot of managerial/leadership skills to run a project.

However, a project is safer in the hands of community than a corporate entity. With community the goal is always the user, the philosophy, the quality. On the contrary, the goal of a corporate is always revenues, at whatever cost. Companies sell products which may endanger user's lives or use monopoly to extract more many that a product is worth of.

Oracle was recently sued by the US government for charging the government more money. Microsoft and Intel have been abusing their monopolies to dictate the industry and kill competition. Free Software/Open Source is the only way we can maintain easy access to core technologies.

Michael Tiemann once told me when Oracle was acquiring Sun, "The great thing about open source is that the software can succeed and survive independent of any particular vendor. I believe that those projects with strong community support will continue to thrive. As for others that depended tremendously on Sun’s own resources, it will be up to Oracle to continue that or not. And on the third hand, perhaps the community will decide independently to suddenly take interest in a project that it had previously ignored, if only because it now sees an opportunity to ride that project to successful independence."

Eventually, it has happened with Openoffice.org. Many users feel that the project has not seen any significant improvement over the years. As compared to Microsoft Office, while it is a powerful product, it has not been able to polish itself to stay abreast with Microsoft Office. Much of it lies in the decision made my the community or the management of Sun/Oracle.

What should happen now?
Pavel wrote in his blog, "What should happen now? I think Oracle has to understand the meritocracy concept better. People from Oracle are doing lot of the work but probably their management is not aware of this fact. Management probably thinks that they are producing small fraction of the OpenOffice.org work.

This is not true! Instead of changing the OOo ecosystem in a meritocracy (and automatically earning the leading status because of the big fraction of work), they keep on current status (having explicitly written benefits for just one company). I hope you understand this because it is hard to describe it in English for me. In the I-want-to-be eco-system, Oracle still has the chance to fork when they are not happy with the status quo (the same thing LibreOffice did this time)."

What does it mean for the community, developers, the industry and ordinary users which uses OpenOffice as an alternative of MS Office? How does it make Microsoft feel which recently launched an anti-Openoffice campaign?

It is good news for users and developers as I said earlier any FOSS projects is better off the hands of any corporate entity whose primary motive is revenues.

There will always be a conflict of interest between the community version of a software and a proprietary and commercial version. If free software is in the blood of the company then the company will carefully chose the elements to be commercialised. Making some elements proprietary is evil doing and doesn't work at all with the industry. The way Oracle executed Open Solaris was bad news for the developers and users.

Many fear OpenOffice and MySQL may meet same fate. Only remedy is to keep a fork, handy. As it happened with OpenSolaris where the community came out with Illumos. LO seems to be heading towards the same direction.

Microsoft: still living in past
Microsoft may like this split as the company still lives in past. In the age of Cloud Computing, the company has launched an attack against Openoffice through video ad. Oracle has not yet responded to the ad. This is surprising as Oracle's chief did not spend a day in trashing HP for Hurd's exit.

LO is in fact bad new for Microsoft, as it now has two forces to fight with -- Oracle owned Oracle Open Office/Openoffice.org and the newly formed Libre Office.

Show me the money not code
Oracle's target is enterprise customers, it's not a company which caters to the desktop users, it doesn't care much about the end users. l

Oracle has already started monetizing on OpenOffice technologies. Oracle has imposed a fee of $90 per user on a plug-in for Microsoft Office which allows Microsoft Office to read, edit and save documents in the ODF (Open Document Format).

The tool was available for free of cost under Sun regimen. The Oracle sales teams will try to find more such avenues of making money from Sun acquired technologies. A lawsuit against Google's Android over Java and tie-up with IBM shows Oracle's strategy regarding Sun technologies. A product/project can't change the approach of a company, on the contrary a company can change the over all concept of a project.

MySQL is one of the major open source projects which has a massive user-base. If my fear is true, you can expect a shake from Oracle to monetize on MySQL as well, leaving end users in limbo.

OpenSolaris is gone, Openoffice is going through a split, that leaves MySQL. Strike three and Foss at Oracle packs its bags. As an Openoffice.org fan and user, I strongly belive that Openoffice.org will continue to develop and improve. However, TDF/Libre Office is more like not keeping all your eggs in one basket. If things do go wrong or in Opensolari way, we will have something to lean on.

As Murphy's law says, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong"

May the fork be with you!