What the heck is happening with OpenOffice?

This weekend was filled with rumors about the fate of OpenOffice. Oracle essentially abandoned OpenOffice, after The Document Foundation’s LibreOffice fork but rumor has it that IBM wants the project to continue. The big question, which is still unresolved as I write this, is, “How? At the moment, almost all of what I have are comments from people close to the matter who are unable to go on the record. That said, here’s my current understanding of what’s going on with OpenOffice.

First, after Oracle booted out the LibreOffice fork developers from OpenOffice, Oracle still didn’t want to invest anymore in OpenOffice. As Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect, said in April, “Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis. We intend to begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office. Oracle will continue to strongly support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF).”

If that sounds like a contradiction in terms: OpenOffice is doing so well that Oracle doesn’t want to manage-read pay for it-you’re not the only one to see it that way. As Louis Suárez-Potts’ OpenOffice’s Community Manager and former Oracle staffer, told my buddy Brian Proffitt that no one’s really sure what Oracle plans for OpenOffice, or what’s more important, what it means for the ODF.