Hi Kevan Looks like no-one wants to offer an answer so as I posted the original post I better give it go. Please note these are my best guesses and I have no insider information of anyone in the companies, communities or people mentioned. Who knows what the future will be, but from the outside you can see that Oracle sells 'Oracle Open Office' as part of their solution suite and it benefits them to have a an office suite offering. I think that Oracle would see little benefit for them in being part of the 'open source community' and hence why the core non-Oracle community felt it was necessary to create LibreOffice Will that still be developed alongside Libre Office? Again guessing but I would think that Oracle may continue to develop their own proprietary version of Oracle Open Office but would think that they would not invest time, money and effort, of any significance, to develop an open source OO.o. If this was the case why would the core developers leave. My guess as above I don't know what Richard Stallman I would imagine that Richard Stallman is referring to StarOffice plugins and its now equivalent Oracle Open Office plugins. Originally OpenOffice.org was the StarOffice code base purchased by Sun and Sun continued to sell the proprietary version of the StarOffice suite with additional proprietary plugins and converters. These equivalent plugins are available to buy from the Oracle website today. As with most things there are often work arounds for these addons but I think the whole idea of corporation's keeping back functional 'extras', often required by large corporate customers for financial gain and leverage is what Richard Stallman objects to. As far as I am aware OO.o or LibreOffice's support for alternative file formats (from the default of .ODF) is not dependant on Sun or Oracle and is part of the open source code. As I understand it before Microsoft released the .doc format OO.o and others reversed engineered the solution but as Microsoft released the .doc format under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise and it has now been widely documented there should be no issues going forward with .doc. Of course .docx (itself allegedly an open standard!) and other MS office equivalents are another matter and the format debates will roll on but I do not see format support getting worse or being affected directly be this decision. As I say this is me guessing and I have no inside knowledge of Oracle or the Core OO.o developers, for full disclosure I work for and own a company that would like to sell services around an open source office suite and it would of course benefit from there being a stable, reliable and trustworthy alternative to Microsoft Office which would offer some future proofing, as of course would a lot of people. To add some further balance regarding Google, Redhat and Canonical supporting this move without being too cynical as Oracle is direct competition for them all they probably would support it. To finish maybe we, or least me, are looking in the wrong direction, concerning ourselves with locally installable office suites while the world moves to proprietary cloud services like ZOHO (now included as a web service in Ubuntu Software Centre) and Google Docs. Philip Oakley http://identi.ca/philoakley http://identi.ca/outserve