Can Apache Put OpenOffice Back Together

It's the best news open source has gotten in some time.

Apache is adopting OpenOffice.org as an official project.

Rob Weir of Apache is jazzed about this, and I am too. Apache is a perfect home for OpenOffice, and OpenOffice is perfect for where Apache is right now.

By that I mean that Apache is traditionally a server organization, a collection of wizards (most of them with jobs at major vendors) tasked with working together on tools enterprises can get direct benefit from. That's the heritage of Apache Server, and many of the group's projects are outgrowths of that work.

But Apache has been spreading out. Since its business model was proven, it has taken on projects that aren't directly related to the server. But a consumer project like OpenOffice.org is something completely different.

There are some hints that IBM may have shepherded this move, as two other IBM executives, Ed Brill and Bob Sutor, have also weighed-in with blog posts on the move. This is all to the good. IBM understands the problems of scaling to consumer proportions that Apache will have to face, if OpenOffice is to be put back on its feet.

But having this directly under IBM, or even under Eclipse (of which IBM is a well-known sponsor) would not have been right for this project. Because the unspoken issue remains -- what of LibreOffice?

A lot of water has flowed under a lot of bridges since Oracle took control of OpenOffice.org and the old maintainers left. The Document Foundation is a going concern. Its outlook and leadership are European, which is valuable in itself, but could make putting the two code bases back together (so they can continue to grow as one) difficult if not impossible.

That's the story to follow. But how much you want to bet that, instead, everyone starts talking about Java? Or about how Oracle somehow "surrendered" to Apache, as though this conflict were a real war and Apache chieftain Doug Cutting (right) were Abraham Lincoln?

Meh.

The truth about what you should be looking at now is based on my interview with Cutting last year, and it is this: 

Keep your eye on the code.