Analysts predict rocky road ahead for OpenOffice

Oracle has lost a stream of developers from its OpenOffice team in recent months, and experts argue that, while the office suite is not doomed yet, its demise is highly possible.

Oracle acquired OpenOffice when it completed the purchase of Sun Microsystems in January. The firm has since launched new versions of the free product, and has promised continued investment.

However, OpenOffice developers clearly have their doubts when it comes to the long-term fate of the suite.

Many have jumped ship to work for LibreOffice, a rival project set up in September by an open source community faction that had grown frustrated with Oracle for not making what they deemed necessary changes to the project's organisation and management.

The faction, called The Document Foundation, has argued that open source communities should be independent from individual sponsors.

Founding member Charles H Schulz told V3.co.uk that the future of OpenOffice is in jeopardy. But analysts suggest that, while Oracle may change some of the fundamentals on which OpenOffice has been built, the suite may continue to be competitive in the office applications market.

Schulz claimed that LibreOffice gained 50 core developers last week, and that this is more than were working on OpenOffice under Oracle.

"Developers are not the only ones leaving OpenOffice; many contributors have also been leaving ever since we announced the Foundation," he said.

However, Schulz insisted that the two development groups are not in competition, and that any suggestion of competing is a "misunderstanding of how open source works".

"It has never been a question of competing with OpenOffice," he said. "We are not a different team from them. We were the community of the OpenOffice project leaving and continuing [at LibreOffice]."

Schulz explained that LibreOffice will look very different from OpenOffice in the future, and that the code base is in "dire need of revamping to make sure it doesn't fall into irrelevance".

"We need to make sure users have choice. It's about innovation. We are not some sort of OpenOffice copy cat project even though we are the same project in terms of human beings," he said.