OpenOffice is a suite of productivity tools for editing text, as well as creating spreadsheets and drawings. Sun acquired the product in 1999 and released the source code in 2000 under an open-source license. Sun uses the OpenOffice code as the foundation of StarOffice, a commercial version of the suite.
OpenOffice.org wants Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) to give up control over the OpenOffice open-source productivity suite and donate the intellectual property to an independent, not-for-profit foundation.
“In an ideal world, open source should not be dependent upon the capriciousness of any one corporation,” OpenOffice.org project leader Louis Suarez-Potts said.
“A foundation doesn’t isolate a project from any one corporation, it provides some distance.”
“The realitiy is that [a foundation] requires Sun to give up the intellectual property to a foundation. That’s a fairly large obstacle,” he added.
