By now you must be familiar with the circumstances leading to the formation of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. If you are not familiar read our earlier coverages here and here. After most of the former OpenOffice developers went away to LibreOffice, LibreOffice has been going from strength to strength. Major Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora and Mandriva have already decided to replaced OpenOffice with LibreOffice in their upcoming releases.

Last week, Oracle did a u-turn and announced that they are now changing OpenOffice.org to a purely community-based project. This was what Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect, said announcing the decision:

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).

After the announcement, the first thing on everyone's mind was if we will see a reunification of LibreOffice and OpenOffice - afterall The Document Foundation did invite Oracle to donate the OpenOffice name and join the The Document Foundation ( and Oracle refused both).

Now, The Document Foundation has made an announcement which effectively means that they do not have any plan to merge with OpenOffice. On behalf of the Steering Committee of The Document Foundation, Charles-H. Schulz wrote that LibreOffice and The Document Foundation community is going forward as planned. They are however always willing to include new members and partners. This effectively means that The Document foundation has no plans to merge LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

Are you in favor of merging OpenOffice and LibreOffice or do you support LibreOffice being a separate project?