Does a fork really help ? I don't think Oracle OpenOffice will go away anytime soon
Most of the people who have backed this fork are Oracle competitors, not some sort of freedom movement.
I suspect we will see a re-branded office suite in some Linux distros, but are most Openoffice users Linux users ? More are windows users looking for a free as in beer office suite with little interest in free as in speech, the Openoffice.org brand is strong and is still owned by the Oracle side of the Openoffice split.
Oracle is not the evil empire some of these people are making out - on their own the are the 6th biggest Kernel contributor - how many lines of code did Ubuntu/Canocial contribute to the average Linux distro - how many did Oracle / Sun ? Who is writing a decent filesystem for Linux - Oracle not Red Hat ( what did happen to Sistina after they were swallowed by Red Hat ? ).
Where did most of the OpenOffice code come from it was not these vocal few, but was bought by Sun and freed or written by Sun engineers, who are still doing much work as Oracle employees.
I guess we will end up with two office suites, the best will survive, but you could argue the real winner is Microsoft, who will have two weaker competitors.
In the long run Open source will loose out, as the next company who thinks about buying a huge product and opensourcing it, simply won't bother. Given the contribution Sun made to this project perhaps it is fair for Sun ( and now Oracle ) to have a reasonable say in its development ? Novell, Redhat and Google et all would never have written it from scratch.
Linux in the data center owes much to Oracle, anyone who works in the business knows they played a huge part in getting Linux taken up as a credible OS. Be careful Red Hat, as companies buy apps and wanted cheap hardware, don't kid yourself your OS is any Solaris - they wanted X86 not Red Hat Linux complete with restrictive support agreements. Anyone know where I can free Red Hat binaries and updates ? They make Oracle look pretty free and easy don't they ?
If Larry is sat in Oracle towers considering whether to spend his money on Opensource Linux or Solaris you may just help him define his investment priorities with actions like this. Even the OpenSolaris thing has been blown out of all proportion - 99% of the contributions to Opensolaris came from Sun/Oracle and they are still willing to make their Source avaiable after Solaris 11 comes out, quite reasonable, unless you are Nexenta trying to get a competitive advantage for your NAS over Oracle by using largely Oracle developed code.
Google are being sued because Oracle ( and Sun before them ) believe they have not played by the license and copyright rules - Linux guys would be quick to come after those who break the GPL.
Perhaps you might think I hate Linux and Opensource, you are very wrong, as I am pro both - but the way some "community" members are claiming the moral high ground will do neither any favours. Trust me Red Hat, Google, Novell are commercial organisations and are all about making money - are they a little scared of Oracle ? Yes, but is Oracle any worse than IBM, HP or any other big corporation - I think not.
Sometimes people should look at what they have been given, not scream and shout because they want more ......