Recently, we've been covering Oracle's hand-off of the OpenOffice productivity suite project to the Apache Software Foundation. OpenOffice remains a beloved open source project, used by millions of people, and there are a lot of questions swirling in the wake of Oracle's decision. The Document Foundation said that there will be no merger of LibreOffice with OpenOffice, but that it would gladly accept any developers wishing to leave OpenOffice.org for LibreOffice. That means that OpenOffice will move forward as a community-driven project on its own. Now, former Microsoft developer Keith Curtis is raising some notable objections to Apache's stewardship of OpenOffice.

Soon after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, we began to wonder what the fate of the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications might be under Oracle. Of course, the suite's fate has gone in surprising new directions since then, but it now looks like Oracle is officially jettisoning management of it. In a brief statement, Oracle chief corporate architect Edward Screve has made clear that OpenOffice will become a purely community-driven project, and Oracle will apparently not offer a commercial version of the suite.

We've written widely about developers of the open source OpenOffice productivity suite resigning, with broad implications for the suite and for LibreOffice, the promising new fork of OpenOffice. Although it's only been a matter of weeks since the fork was announced, The Document Foundation (TDF) and community members are working away at a new suite, and there are signs that users will see much improvement in it, as compared to OpenOffice. Judging from these signs, and what has been achieved with previous OpenOffice forks, users are still likely to win following the big OpenOffice brouhaha.